Skip to main content

Full text of "A Ten Years' War: An Account of the Battle with the Slum in New York"

See other formats 


Google 



This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project 

to make the world's books discoverable online. 

It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject 

to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books 

are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover. 

Marks, notations and other maiginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the 

publisher to a library and finally to you. 

Usage guidelines 

Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the 
public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing tliis resource, we liave taken steps to 
prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying. 
We also ask that you: 

+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for 
personal, non-commercial purposes. 

+ Refrain fivm automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine 
translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the 
use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help. 

+ Maintain attributionTht GoogXt "watermark" you see on each file is essential for in forming people about this project and helping them find 
additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it. 

+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just 
because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other 
countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any specific use of 
any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner 
anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liabili^ can be quite severe. 

About Google Book Search 

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers 
discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web 

at |http: //books .google .com/I 



. •• 









'* 



A TEN YEARS' WAR 

AN AOOOnNT OF THE BATTLE 

WITH THE SLTJM IN 

NEW YOEK 

Br 
JACOB jC'^S 

xvTBOK or "bow iHi mmn jult ui 
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




BOSTON AND NEW T(»K 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIH' AND COMPANT 
tan R^atSx Vr^i CsoAviagx 



COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY JACOB A. RIIS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



TO THE FAINT-HEARTED AND THOSE OF LITTLE 

FAITH THIS VOLUME IS REPROACHFULLY 

INSCRIBED BT THE AUTHOR 



l'B5844 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PlOB 

I. The Battle with the Slum ... 1 

II. The Tenement House Bliqht . . 30 

in. The Tenement: cubing its Blight . . 68 

IV. The Tenant 104 

y. The Genesis of the Gang . • . 139 

VI. Letting in the Light .... 169 

VII. Justice for the Boy 204 

VIII. Refobm bt Humane Touch . • • 239 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAsa 

Colonel George E. Waring, Jr. . Frontispiece 
Police Station Lodging Room on East Side . 18 
The Mott Street Barracks .... 74 

Alfred Corning Clark Buildings — Model Tene- 
ments of City and Suburban Homes Company . . 84 
Evening in one of the Courts of Mills House 

No. 1 94 

Bone Alley 134 

Mulberry Bend Park 180 

Letter H Plan of Public School No. 165 (show- 
ing front on West 109th Street) . . . .214 
Playground on Roof of New East Broadway 

ScHOOLHOUSE (area 8,348 square feet) . . 220 
A Tammany-swept East Side Street before 

Waring 242 

The Same East Side Street when Colonel War- 
ing wielded the Broom 248 

Theodore Roosevelt .•..., 262 



A TEN YEARS' WAR 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 

The slum is as old as civilization. Civ- 
ilization implies a race^ to get ahead. In 
a race there are usually some who for one 
cause or another cannot keep up^ or are 
thrust out from among their fellows. They 
fall behind^ and when they have been left 
far in the rear they lose hope and ambition^ 
and give up. Thenceforward, if left to their 
own resources, they are the victims, not the 
masters, of their environment; and it is a 
bad master. They drag one another always 
farther down. The bad envir onment becom es 
the heredity of the ^^^^ ffnuTritimr* Then, 
given the crowd, you have the slum ready- 
made. 

The battle with the slum began the day 
civilization recognized in it her enemy. It 
was a losing fight until conscience joined 



2 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

forces with fear and self-interest against it. 
When common sense and the golden rule 
obtain among men as a rule of practice, it 
will be over. The two have not always been 
classed together, but here they are plainly 
seen to belong together. Justice to the indi- 
vidual is accepted in theory as the only safe 
groundwork of the commonwealth. When it 
is practiced in dealing with the slum, there 
will shortly be no slum. We need not wait 
for the millennium, to get rid of it. We 
can do it now. All that is required is that 
it shall not be left to itself. That is justice 
to it and to us, since its grievous ailment is 
that it cannot help itself. When a man is 
drowning, the thing to do is to pull him out 
of the water; afterward there will be time 
for talking it over. We got at it the other 
way in dealing with our social problems. 
The doctrinaires had their day, and they de- 
cided to let bad enough alone ; that it was 
unsafe to interfere with "causes that oper- 
ate sociologically," as one survivor of these 
unfittest put it to me. It was a piece of 
scientific humbug that cost the age which 
listened to it dear. "Causes that operate 
sociologically" are the opportunity of the 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 3 

political and every other kind of scamp who 
trades upon the depravity and helplessness 
of the slum^ and the refuge of the pessimist 
who is useless in the fight against them. 
We have not done yet paying the bills he 
ran up for us. Some time since we turned 
tO; to pull the drowning man out, and it was 
time. A little while longer, and we should 
have been in danger of being dragged down 
with him. 

The slum comp laint had been chronic in 
ages, but tne great changes which the 
mSSte^h century saw, the new industry, 
political freedom, brought on an acute at- 
tack which threatened to become fatal. Too 
many of us had supposed that, built as our 
commonwealth was on universal suffrage, it 
would be proof against the complaints that 
harassed older states ; but in fact it turned 
out that there was extra hazard in that. 
Having solemnly resolved that fall men ar e 
creat ed eaual jand have certain inalienable 
rignts, am^ them life, Uberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness, we shut our eyes and 
waited for the formula to work. It was as 
if a man with a cold should take the doc- 
tor's prescription to bed with him, expect- 



4 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

ing it to cure him. The formula was all 
right, but merely repeating it worked no 
cure. When, after a hundred years, we 
opened our eyes, it was upon sixty cents 
a day as the living wage of the working- 
woman in our cities; upon "knee pants" 
at forty cents a dozen for the making ; upon 
the Potter's Field taking tithe of our city 
life, ten per cent, each year for the trench, 
truly the Lost Tenth of the slum. Our 
country had grown great and rich ; through 
our ports was poured food for the millions 
of Europe. But in the back streets multi- 
tudes huddled in ignorance and want. The 
foreign oppressor had been vanquished, the 
fetters stricken from the black man at home ; 
but his white brother, in his bitter plight, 
sent up a cry of distress that had in it a dis- 
tinct note of menace. Political freedom we 
had won; but the problem of helpless pov- 
erty, grown vast with the added offscour- 
ings of the Old World, mocked us, unsolved. 
Liberty at sixty cents a day set presently its 
stamp upon the government of our cities, 
and it became the scandal and the peril of 
our political system. 

So the battle began. Three times since 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 5 

the war that absorbed the nation's energies 
and attention had the slum confronted us 
in New York with its challenge. In the 
darkest days of the great struggle it was 
the treacherous mob ; later on, the threat 
of the cholera, which found swine foraging 
in the streets as the only scavengers, and 
a swarming host, but little above the hog 
in its appetites and in the quality of the 
shelter afforded it, peopling the back alleys. 
Still later, the mob, caught looting the city's 
treasury with its idol, the thief Tweed, at its 
head, drunk with power and plunder, had 
insolently defied the outraged community to 
do its worst. There were meetings and pro- 
tests. The rascals were turned out for a 
season ; the arch-thief died in jail. I see 
him now, going through the gloomy portals 
of the Tombs, whither, as a newspaper re- 
porter, I had gone with him, his stubborn 
head held high as ever. I asked myself 
more than once, at the time when the vile 
prison was torn down, whether the comic 
clamor to have the ugly old gates preserved 
and set up in Central Park had anything 
to do with the memory of the ^^ martyred " 
thief, or whether it was in joyful celebration 



6 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

of the fact that others had escaped. His 
name is even now one to conjure with in 
the Sixth Ward. He never " squealed/' and 
he was " so good to the poor " — evidence 
that the slum is not laid by the heels by 
merely destroying Five Points and the Mul- 
berry Bend. There are other fights to be 
fought in that war, other victories to be 
won, and it is slow work. It was nearly 
ten years after the great robbery before de- 
cency got the upper grip in good earnest. 
That was when the civic conscience awoke 
in 1879. 

In that year the slum was arraigned in 
the churches. The sad and shameful story 
was told of how it grew and was fostered 
by avarice, that saw in the homeless crowds 
from over the sea only a chance for busi- 
ness, and exploited them to the uttermost, 
making sometimes a hundred per cent, on 
the capital invested, — always most out of 
the worst houses, from the tenants of which 
" nothing was expected " save that they pay 
the usurious rents ; how Christianity, citizen- 
ship, human fellowship, shook their skirts 
clear of the rabble that was only good 
enough to fill the greedy purse, and how 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 7 

the rabble^ left to itself, improved such 
opportunities as it found after such fashion 
as it knew ; how it ran elections merely to 
count its thugs in, and fattened at the pub- 
Uc crib ; and how the whole evil thing had 
its root in the tenements, where the home 
had ceased to be sacred, — those dark and 
deadly dens in which the family ideal was 
tortured to death, and character was smoth- 
ered; in which children were ^Mamned rather 
than born" into the world, thus realizing 
a slum kind of foreordination to torment, 
happUy brief in many cases. The Tene- 
ment House Committee long afterward called 
the worst of the barracks " infant slaughter 
houses," and showed, by reference to the 
mortality lists, that they killed one in every 
five babies born in them. 

The story shocked the town into action. 
Plans for a better kind of tenement were 
called for, and a premium was put on every 
ray of light and breath of air that could 
be let into it. Money was raised to build 
model houses, and a bill to give the health 
authorities summary powers in dealing with 
tenements was sent to the legislature. The 
landlords held it up until the last day of 



10 A TEN YEARS' WAB 

the Parkhurst and Lexow disclosures^ reform 
came with a shock that dislodged Tammany, 
it found us wide awake, and, it must be ad- 
mitted, not a Uttle astonished at our sudden 
access of righteousness. 

The battle went against the slum in the 
three years that followed, until it found back- 
ing in the '' odium of reform " that became 
the issue in the municipal organization of the 
greater city. Tammany made notes. Of what 
was done, how it was done, and why, during 
those years, I shall have occasion to speak 
further in these pages. Here I wish to mea- 
sure the stretch we have come since I wrote 
'^ How the Other Half Lives," ten years ago. 
Some of it we came plodding, and some at 
full speed ; some of it in the face of every 
obstacle that could be thrown in our way, 
wresting victory from defeat at every step ; 
some of it with the enemy on the run. Take 
it altogether, it is a long way. Most of it 
will not have to be traveled over again. The 
engine of municipal progress, once started as 
it has been in New York, may slip many a 
cog with Tammany as the engineer ; it may 
even be stopped for a season ; but it can 
never be made to work backward. Even 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 11 

Tammany knows that^ and is building the 
schools she so long neglected^ and so is 
hastening the day when she shall be but 
an unsavory memory. 

How we strove for those schools^ to no 
purpose! Our arguments^ our anger, the 
anxious pleading of philanthropists who saw 
the young on the East Side going to ruin, 
the warning year after year of the superin- 
tendent of schools that the compulsory edu- 
cation law was but an empty mockery where 
it was most needed, the knocking of un- 
counted thousands of children for whom 
there was no room, — uncounted in sober 
fact ; there was not even a way of finding out 
how many were adrift, — brought only the 
response that the tax rate must be kept down. 
Kept down it was. " Waste " was success- 
fully averted at the spigot; at the bunghole 
it went on unchecked. In a swarming popu- 
lation like that you must have either schools 
or jails, and the jails waxed fat with the over- 
flow. The East Side, that had been orderly, 
became a hotbed of child crime. And when, 
in answer to the charge made by a legis- 
lative committee that the father forced his 
child into the shop, on a perjured age certi- 



12 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

ficate^ to labor when he ought to have been 
at play, that father, bent and heavy-eyed 
with unceasing toil, flung back the charge 
with the bitter reproach that we gave him no 
other choice, that it was either the street or 
the shop for his boy, and that perjury for him 
was cheaper than the ruin of the child, we 
were mute. What, indeed, was there to say? 
The crime was ours, not his. That was but 
yesterday. To-day we can count the months 
to the time when every child who knocks 
shall find a seat in our schools. We have a 
school census to tell us of the need. In that 
most crowded neighborhood in all the world, 
where the superintendent lately pleaded in 
vain for three new schools, five have been 
built, the finest in this or any other land, — 
great, light, and airy structures, with play- 
grounds on the roof; and all over the city 
the like are going up. The briefest of our 
laws, every word of which is like the blow 
of a hammer driving the nails home in the 
cofBn of the bad old days, says that never 
one shall be built without its playground. 
So the boy is coming to his rights. 

The streets are cleaned, — not necessarily 
clean just now; Colonel Waring is dead, 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 13 

with his doctrine of putting a man instead 
of a voter behind every broom^ killed by poli- 
ties, he and his doctrine both, — but cleaned. 
The slum has even been washed. We tried 
that on Hester Street years ago, in the age 
of cobblestone pavements, and the result 
fairly frightened us. I remember the indig- 
nant reply of a well-known citizen, a man of 
large business responsibiUty and experience 
in the handling of men, to whom the ofBce 
of street-cleaning commissioner had been 
offered, when I asked him if he would ac- 
cept. "I have lived," he said, "a blameless 
life for forty years, and have a character 
in the community. I cannot afford— no 
man with a reputation can afford— to hold 
that ofBce; it will surely wreck it." That 
was then. It made Colonel Waring's repu- 
tation. He took the trucks from the streets. 
Tammany, in a brief interregnum of vigor 
under Mayor Grant, had laid the axe to the 
unsightly telegraph poles and begun to pave 
the streets with asphalt, but it left the trucks 
and the ash barrels to Colonel Waring as 
hopeless. Trucks have votes; at least their 
drivers have. Now that they are gone, the 
drivers would be the last to bring them 



14 A TEN YEARS' WAB 

back; for they have children^ too^ and the 
rescued streets gave them their first play- 
ground. Perilous^ begrudged by policeman 
and storekeeper^ though it was, it was still 
a playground. 

But one is coming in which the boy shaU 
rule unchallenged. The Mulberry Bend 
Park kept its promise. Before the sod was 
laid in it two more were imder way in the 
thickest of the tenement house crowding, 
and each, under the law which brought them 
into existence, is to be laid out in part as a 
playground. They are not yet finished, but 
they will be ; for the people have taken to 
the idea, and the poUtician has made a note 
of the fact. He saw a great light when the 
play piers were opened. In half a dozen 
localities where the slum was striking its 
roots deep into the soil such piers are now 
being built, and land is being acquired for 
small parks. We shall yet settle the *^ causes 
that operated sociologically" on the boy 
with a lawn mower and a sand heap. You 
have got your boy, and the heredity of the 
next one, when you can order his setting. 

Even while I am writing, a bill is urged in 
the legislature to build in every senatorial 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 16 

district m the city a gymnasium and a pubUo 
bath. It matters little whether it passes at 
this session or not. The important thing is 
that it is there. The rest will follow. A 
people's club is being organized, to crowd 
out the saloon that has had a monopoly of 
the brightness and the cheer in the tene- 
ment streets too long. The labor unions 
are bestirring themselves to deal with the 
sweating curse, and the gospel of less law 
and more enforcement sits enthroned at 
Albany. Theodore Roosevelt will teach us 
again Jefferson's forgotten lesson, that *^ the 
whole art of government consists in being 
honest." With a back door to every ordi- 
nance that touched the lives of the people, if 
indeed the whole thing was not the subject 
of open ridicule or the vehicle of official 
blackmail, it seemed as if we had provided a 
perfect municipal machinery for bringing 
the law into contempt with the young, and 
so for wrecking citizenship by the shortest 
cut. 

Of free soup there is an end. It was 
never food for free men. The last spoonful 
was ladled out by yellow journalism with the 
certificate of the men who fought Roosevelt 



16 A TEN YEARS' WAB 

and reform in the police board that it was 
good. It is not likely that it will ever 
plague us again. Our experience has taught 
us a new reading of the old word that 
charity covers a multitude of sins. It does. 
Uncovering some of them has kept us busy 
since our conscience awoke, and there are 
more left. The worst of them all, that 
awful parody on municipal charity, the 
police station lodging room, is gone, after 
twenty years of persistent attack upon the 
foul dens, — years during which they were 
arraigned, condemned, indicted by every 
authority having jurisdiction, all to no pur- 
pose. The stale beer dives went with them 
and with the Bend, and the grip of the 
tramp on our throat has been loosened. 
We shall not easily throw it off altogether, 
for the tramp has a vote, too, for which 
Tammany, with admirable ingenuity, has 
found a new use, since the ante-election 
inspection of lodging houses has made them 
less available for colonization purposes than 
they were. Perhaps I should say a new 
way of very old use. It is simpUcity itself. 
Instead of keeping tramps in hired lodgings 
for weeks at a daily outlay, the new way is 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 17 

to send them all to the island on short com- 
mitments during the canvass^ and vote them 
from there en bloc at the city^s expense. 
Time and education must solve that, like so 
many other problems which the slum has 
thrust upon us. They are the forces upon 
which, when we have gone as far as our 
present supply of steam wiU carry us, we 
must always fall back ; and this we may do 
with confidence so long as we keep stirring, 
if it is only marking time, as now. It is in 
the retrospect that one sees how far we have 
come, after all, and from that gathers cour- 
age for the rest of the way. Twenty-nine 
years have passed since I slept in a police 
station lodging house, a lonely lad, and was 
robbed, beaten, and thrown out for protest- 
ing; and when the vagrant cur that had 
joined its homelessness to mine, and had sat 
all night at the door waiting for me to come 
out, — it had been clubbed away the night 
before, — snarled and showed its teeth at 
the doorman, raging and impotent I saw 
it beaten to death on the step. I little 
dreamed then that the friendless beast, dead, 
should prove the undoing of the monstrous 
wrong done by the maintenance of these 



18 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

evil holes to every helpless man and woman 
who was without shelter in New York ; but 
it did. It was after an inspection of the 
lodging rooms^ when I stood with Theodore 
Roosevelt; then president of the poUce boards 
in the one where I had slept that night, and 
told him of it, that he swore they should go. 
And go they did, as did so many another 
abuse in those two years of honest purpose 
and effort. I hated them. It may not have 
been a very high motive to furnish power 
for municipal reform; but we had tried 
every other way, and none of them worked. 
Arbitration is good, but there are times 
when it becomes necessary to knock a man 
down and arbitrate sitting on him, and this 
was such a time. It was what we started 
out to do with the rear tenements, the worst 
of the slum barracks, and it would have been 
better had we kept on that track. I have 
always maintained that we made a false 
move when we stopped to discuss damages 
with the landlord, or to hear his side of it at 
all. His share in it was our grievance; it 
blocked the mortality records with its burden 
of human woe. The damage was all ours, 
the profit all his. If there are damages to 






• « 
» - • 



• •• 



• **m 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 19 

collect, he should foot the bill, not we. 
Vested rights are to be protected, but no 
man has a right to be protected in killing 
his neighbor. 

However, they are down, the worst of 
them. The community has asserted its right 
to destroy tenements that destroy life, and 
for that cause. We bought the slum off in 
the Mulberry Bend at its own figure. On 
the rear tenements we set the price, and set 
it low. It was a long step. Bottle Alley 
is gone, and Bandits' Boost. Bone Alley^ 
Thieves' Alley, and Kerosene Row, — they 
are all gone. Hellas Kitchen and Poverty 
Gap have acquired standards of decency; 
Poverty Gap has risen even to the height of 
neckties. The time is fresh in my recol- 
leciion when a different kind of necktie was 
its pride; when ike boy murderer -he was 
barely nineteen — who wore it on the gal- 
lows took leave of the captain of detectives 
with the cheerful invitation to " come over to 
the wake. They will have a high old time." 
And the event fully redeemed the promise. 
The whole Gap turned out to do the dead 
bully honor. I have not heard from the 
Gap, and hardly from Hell's Kitchen, in five 



20 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

years. The last news from the Kitchen was 
when the thin wedge of a column of negroes, 
in their uptown migration, tried to squeeze 
in, and provoked a race war; but that in 
fairness should not be laid up against it. 
In certain local aspects it might be ac- 
counted a sacred duty ; as much so as to get 
drunk and provoke a fight on the anniver^ 
sary of the battle of the Boyne. But on the 
whole the Kitchen has grown orderly. The 
gang rarely beats a policeman nowadays, and 
it has not killed one in a long while. 

So, one after another, the outworks of 
the slum have been taken. It has been 
beaten in many battles ; but its reserves are 
unimpaired. More tenements are being 
built every day on twenty-five-foot lots, and 
however watchfully such a house is planned, 
if it is to return to the builder the profit he 
seeks, it will have that within it which, the 
moment the grasp of official sanitary super- 
vision is loosened, must summon up the 
ghost of the slum. The common type of 
tenement to-day is the double-decker, and 
the double-decker is hopeless. In it the 
crowding goes on at a constantly increasing 
rate. This is the sore spot, and as against 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 21 

it aU the rest seems often enough unavafl- 
ing. Yet it cannot be. It is true that the 
home, about which all that is to work for 
permanent progress must cluster, is strug- 
gling against desperate odds in the tene- 
ment, and that the struggle has been re- 
flected in the morals of the people, in the 
corruption of the young, to an alarming 
extent ; but it must be that the higher stand- 
ards now set up on every hand, in the cleaner 
streets, in the better schools, in the parks 
and the clubs, in the settlements, and in the 
thousand and one agencies for good that 
touch and help the lives of the poor at as 
many points, will tell at no distant day, and 
react upon the homes and upon their build- 
ers. To any one who knew the East Side, 
for instance, ten years ago, the difference 
between that day and this in the appearance 
of the children whom he sees there must 
be striking. Rags and dirt are now the ex- 
ception rather than the rule. Perhaps the 
statement is a trifle too strong as to the dirt ; 
but dirt is not harmful except when coupled 
with rags ; it can be washed off, and now- 
adays is washed off where such a thing 
would have been considered affectation in 



22 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

the days that were. Soap and water have 
worked a visible cure abeady^ that must go 
more than skin-deep. They are moral agents 
of the first value in the slum. And the day 
must come when rapid transit will cease to 
be a football between contending forces in a 
city of three million people, and the reason 
for the outrageous crowding will cease to 
exist with the scattering of the centres of 
production to the suburb. That day may 
be a long way off, measured by the impa- 
tience of the philanthropist, but it is bound 
to come. Meanwhile, philanthropy is not 
sitting idle and waiting. It is building tene- 
ments on the humane plan that wipes out 
the lines of the twenty-five-foot lot, and lets 
in sunshine and air and hope. It is patting 
up hotels deserving of the name for the 
army that but just now had no other .home 
than the cheap lodging houses which In- 
spector Byrnes fitly called " nurseries of 
crime." These also are standards from which 
there is no backing down, even if coming up 
to them is slow work : and they are here to 
stay, for they pay. That is the test. Not 
charity, but justice, — that is the gospel 
which they preach. 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 23 

Flushed with the success of many vic- 
tories^ we challenged the slum to a fight to 
the finish a year ago, and bade it come on. 
It came on. On our side fought the brav- 
est and best. The man who marshaled the 
citizen forces for their candidate had been 
foremost in building homes, in erecting 
baths for the people, in directing the self- 
sacrificing labors of the oldest and worthiest 
of the agencies for improving the condition 
of the poor. With him battled men who 
had given lives of patient study and effort 
to the cause of helping their fellow men. 
Shoulder to shoulder with them stood the 
thoughtful workingman from the East Side 
tenement. The slum, too, marshaled its 
forces. Tammany produced her notes. She 
pointed to the increased tax rate, showed 
what it had cost to build schools and parks 
and to clean house, and called it criminal 
recklessness. The issue was made sharp 
and clear. The war cry of the slum was 
characteristic : " To hell with reform ! " We 
all remember the result. Politics interfered, 
and turned victory into defeat. We were 
beaten. I shall never forget that election 
night. I walked home through the Bowery 



24 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

in the midnight hour, and saw it gorging it- 
self, like a starved wolf, upon the promise of 
the morrow. Drunken men and women sat 
in every doorway, howling ribald songs and 
curses. Hard faces I had not seen for years 
showed themselves about the dives. The 
mob made merry after its fashion. The old 
days were coming back. Reform was dead, 
and decency with it. 

A year later, I passed that same way 
on the night of election. The scene was 
strangely changed. The street was unusu- 
ally quiet for such a time. Men stood in 
groups about the saloons, and talked in 
whispers, with serious faces. The name of 
Roosevelt was heard on every hand. The 
dives were running, but there was no shout- 
ing, and violence was discouraged. When, 
on the following day, I met the proprietor of 
one of the oldest concerns in the Bowery, — 
which, while doing a legitimate business, 
caters necessarily to its crowds, and there- 
fore sides with them, — he told me with 
bitter reproach how he had been stricken in 
pocket. A gambler had just been in to see 
him, who had come on from the far West, 
in anticipation of a wide-open town, and had 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 25 

got all ready to open a house in the Tender^ 
loin. " He brought $40,000 to put in the 
business, and he came to take it away to 

Baltimore. Just now the cashier of 

Bank told me that two other gentlemen — 
gamblers ? yes, that *s what you call them — 
had drawn $130,000 which they would 
have invested here, and had gone after him. 
Think of all that money gone to Baltimore ! 
That *s what you Ve done ! " 

I went over to police headquarters, think- 
ing of the sad state of that man, and in the 
hallway I ran across two children, little tots, 
who were inquiring their way to ^* the com- 
missioner." The older was a hunchback 
girl, who led her younger brother (he could 
not have been over five or six years old) 
by the hand. They explained their case to 
me. They came from Allen Street. Some 
undesirable women tenants had moved into 
the tenement, and when complaint was made 
that sent the police there, the children's 
father, who was a poor Jewish tailor, was 
blamed. The tenants took it out of the boy 
by punching his nose till it bled. Where- 
upon the children went straight to Mulberry 
Street to see the commissioner and get jus- 



26 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

tice. It was the first time in twenty years 
that I had known Allen Street to come to 
police headquarters for justice; and in the 
discovery that the new idea had reached 
down to the little children I read the doom 
of the slum, despite its loud vauntings. 

No, it was not true that reform was dead, 
with decency. It was not the slum that had 
won ; it was we who had lost. We were not 
up to the mark, — not yet. But New York 
is a many times cleaner and better city to-day 
than it was ten years ago. Then I was able 
to grasp easily the whole plan for wresting 
it from the neglect and indifference that had 
put us where we were. It was chiefly, al- 
most wholly, remedial in its scope. Now it 
is preventive, constructive, and no ten men 
could gather all the threads and hold them. 
We have made, are making headway, and 
no Tammany has the power to stop us. She 
knows it, too, and is in such frantic haste to 
fill her pockets while she has time that she 
has abandoned her old ally, the tax rate, 
and the pretense of making bad government 
cheap government. She is at this moment 
engaged in raising taxes and assessments at 
one and the same time to an unheard-of fig- 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 27 

ure^ while salaries are being increased lav- 
ishly on every hand. We can afford to pay 
all she charges us for the lesson we are 
learning. If to that we add common sense^ 
we shall discover the bearings of it all with- 
out trouble. Yesterday I picked up a book, 

— a learned disquisition on government, 

— and read on the title-page, "Affection- 
ately dedicated to all who despise poUtics." 
That was not common sense. To win the 
battle with the slum, we must not begin by 
despising politics. We have been doing that 
too long. The politics of the slum is apt to 
be like the slum itself, dirty. Then it must 
be cleaned. It is what the fight is about. 
Politics is the weapon. We must learn to 
use it so as to cut straight and sure. That 
is common sense, and the golden rule as 
applied to Tammany. 

Some years ago, the United States govern- 
ment conducted an inquiry into the slums 
of great cities. To its staff of experts was 
attached a chemist, who gathered and iso- 
lated a lot of bacilli with fearsome Latin 
names, in the tenements where he went. 
Among those he labeled were the Staphy- 
lococcus pyogenes albus^ the Micrococcus 



28 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

fervidomSy the Saccharomyces rosaceus^ and 
the Bacillus buccalis fortuitus. I made a 
note of the names at the time^ hecause of 
the dread with which they inspired me. But 
I searched the collection in vain for the real 
bacUlus of the slum. It escaped science, to 
be identified by human sympathy and a 
conscience-stricken community with that of 
ordinary human selfishness. The antitoxin 
h« hi found, and U applied sueeerfnUy. 
Since lustiee has replaced charity on the 
prescription the patient is improving. And 
the improvement is not confined to him ; it is 
general. Conscience is not a local issue in 
our day. A few years ago, a United States 
Senator sought reelection on the platform 
that the decalogue and the golden rule were 
glittering generalities that had no place 
in politics, and lost. We have not quite 
reached the millennium yet, but to-day a 
man is governor in the Empire State who 
was elected on the pledge that he would 
rule by the ten commandments. These are 
facts that mean much or little, according to 
the way one looks at them. The signifi- 
cant thing is that they are facts, and that, 
in spite of slipping and sliding, the world 



THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 29 

moves forward, not backward. The poor 
we shall have always with us, but the slum 
we need not have. These two do not right- 
fully belong together. Their present part- 
nership is at once poverty's worst hardship 
and our worst fault. 



n 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 

In a Stanton Street tenement^ the other 
day, I stumbled upon a Polish capmaker's 
home. There were other capmakers in the 
house, Russian and Polish, but they simply 
" lived " there. This one had a home. The 
fact proclaimed itself the moment the door 
was opened, in spite of the darkness. The 
rooms were in the rear, gloomy with the twi- 
light of the tenement, although the day was 
sunny without, but neat, even cosy. It was 
early, but the day's chores were evidently 
done. The teakettle sang on the stove, at 
which a bright-looking girl of twelve, with 
a pale but cheery face, and sleeves brushed 
back to the elbows, was busy poking up the 
fire. A little boy stood by the window, flat- 
tening his nose against the pane and gazing 
wistfully up among the chimney pots where 
a piece of blue sky about as big as the kitchen 
could be made out. I remarked to the mother 
that they were nice rooms. 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 31 

^' Ah yes/' she said, with a weary little 
smile that struggled bravely with hope long 
deferred, ^^ but it is hard to make a home 
here. We would so like to live in the front, 
but we can't pay the rent." 

I knew the front with its unlovely view 
of the tenement street too well, and I said a 
good word for the air shaft — yard or court 
it could not be called, it was too small for 
that — which rather surprised myself. I had 
found few virtues enough in it before. The 
girl at the stove had left off poking the fire. 
She broke in the moment I finished, with 
eager enthusiasm : " Why, they have the sun 
in there. When the door is opened the light 
comes right in your face." 

*^ Does it never come here ? " I asked, and 
wished I had not done so, as soon as the 
words were spoken. The child at the win- 
dow was listening, with his whole hungry lit- 
tle soul in his eyes. 

Yes, it did, she said. Once every summer, 
for a little while, it came over the houses. 
She knew the month and the exact hour of 
the day when its rays shone into their home, 
and just the reach of its slant on the wall. 
They had lived there six years. In June the 



32 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

sun was due. A haunting fear that the baby 
would ask how long it was till June — it was 
February then — took possession of me, and 
I hastened to change the subject. Warsaw 
was their old home. They kept a little store 
there, and were young and happy. Oh, it 
was a fine city, with parks and squares^ and 
bridges over the beautiful river, — and grass 
and flowers and birds and soldiers, put in 
the girl breathlessly. She remembered. But 
the children kept coming, and they went 
across the sea to give them a better chance. 
Father made fifteen dollars a week, much 
money ; but there were long seasons when 
there was no work. She, the mother, was 
never very well here, — she had n't any 
strength ; and the baby ! She glanced at 
his grave white face, and took him in her 
arms. The picture of the two, and of the 
pale-faced girl longing back to the fields 
and the sunlight, in their prison of gloom 
and gray walls, haunts me yet. I have not 
had the courage to go back since. I re- 
called the report of an English army sur- 
geon, which I read years ago, on the many 
more soldiers that died — were killed would 
be more correct — in barracks into which 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 33 

the sun never shone than in those that were 
open to the light. They have yet two months 
to the sun in Stanton Street. 

The capmaker's case is the case of the 
nineteenth century^ of civilization, against 
the metropolis of America. The home, the 
family, are the rallying points of civiliza- 
tion. But long since the tenements of New 
York earned for it the ominous name of 
"the homeless city." In its 40,000 tene- 
ments its workers, more than half of the 
city's population, are housed. They have 
no other chance. There are, indeed, wives 
and mothers who, by sheer force of char- 
acter, rise above their environment and make 
homes where they go. B[appily, there are 
yet many of them. But the fact remains 
that hitherto their struggle has been grow- 
ing ever harder, and the issue more doubtful. 

The tenement itself, with its crowds, its 
lack of privacy, is the greatest destroyer of 
individuality, of character. As its numbers 
increase, so does ^^ the element that becomes 
criminal for lack of individuality and the 
self-respect that comes with it." Add the 
shiftless and the weak who are turned out 
by the same process, and you have its legiti- 



34 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

mate crop. In 1880 the average number of 
persons to each dwelling in New York was 
16.37; in 1890 it was 18.52. In 1895, 
according to the police census, 21.2. The 
census of 1900 will show the crowding to 
have gone on at an equal if not at a greater 
rate. That will mean that so many more 
tenements have been built of the modern 
type, with four famiUes to the floor where 
once there were two. I shall not weary the 
reader with many statistics. They are to be 
found, by those who want them, in the cen- 
sus books and in the ofBicial records. I shall 
try to draw from them their human story. 
But, as an instance of the unchecked drift, 
let me quote here the case of the Tenth 
Ward, that East Side district known as the 
most crowded in all the world. In 1880, 
when it had not yet attained that bad emi- 
nence, it contained 47,554 persons, or 432.3 
to the acre. In 1890 the census showed a 
population of 57,596, which was 522 to 
the acre. The police census of 1895 found 
70,168 persons living in 1514 houses, which 
was 643.08 to the acre. Lastly, the Health 
Department's census for the first half of 
1898 gave a total of 82,175 persons living 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 35 

in 1201 tenements, with 313 inhabited build- 
ings yet to be heaxd from. This is the pro- 
cess of doubling up, — literally, since the 
cause and the vehicle of it all is the double- 
decker tenement, — which in the year 1895 
had crowded a single block in that ward at 
the rate of 1526 persons per acre, and one 
in the Eleventh Ward at the rate of 1774.^ 
It goes on not in the Tenth Ward or on 
the East Side only, but throughout the city. 
When, in 1897, it was proposed to lay out 
a small park in the Twenty-Second Ward, 
up on the far West Side, it was shown that 
five blocks in that section, between Forty- 
Ninth and Sixty-Second streets and Ninth 
and Eleventh avenues, had a population of 
more than 3000 each. The block between 
Sixty-First and Sixty-Second streets. Tenth 
and Eleventh avenues, harbored 3580, which 
meant 974.6 persons to the acre. 

If we have here to do with forces that 
are beyond the control of the individual or 
the community, we shall do well at least to 

^ Police census of 1895 : Block bounded by Canal, Hes- 
ter, Eldridge, and Forsyth streets : size 375 X 200, popu- 
lation 2628, rate per acre 1526. Block bounded by Stan- 
ton, Houston, Attorney, and Ridge streets : size 200 X 300, 
population 2244, rate per acre 1774. 



36 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

face the facts squarely and know the truth. 
It is no answer to the charge that New 
York's way of housing its workers is the 
worst in the world to say that they are bet- 
ter off than they were where they came 
from. It is not true^ in most cases, as far 
as the home is concerned : a shanty is bet- 
ter than a flat in a cheap tenement, any 
day. Even if it were true, it would still 
be beside the issue. In Poland my cap- 
maker counted for nothing. Nothing was 
expected of him. Here he ranks, after a 
few brief years, politically equal with the 
man who hires his labor. A citizen's duty 
is expected of him, and home and citizen- 
ship are convertible terms. The observation 
of the Frenchman who had watched the ex- 
periment of herding two thousand human 
beings in eight tenement barracks in Paris, 
that the result was the " exasperation of the 
tenant against society," is true the world 
over. We have done as badly in New York. 
Social hatefulness is not a good soil for citi- 
zenship to grow in, where political equality 
rules. 

Nor will the old lie about the tenants 
being wholly to blame cover the ground. It 



/ 

^ 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 37 

has long been overworked in defense of 
landlord usury. Doubtless there are bad 
tenants. In the matter of renting houses, 
as in everything else, men have a trick of 
coming up to what is expected of them, 
good or bad; but as a class the tenants 
have been shown all along to be superior 
to their surroundings. "Better than the 
houses they live in," said the first Tenement 
House Commission ; and the second gave as 
its verdict that "they respond quickly to 
improved conditions." That is not an hon- 
est answer. The truth is that if we cannot 
check the indraught to the cities, we can, 
if we choose, make homes for those who 
come, and at a profit on the investment. 
Nothing has been more clearly demonstrated 
in our day, and it is time that it should be 
said so that everybody can understand. It 
is not a case of transforming human nature 
m the tenant, but of reforming it in the 
landlord builder. It is a plain question of 
the per cent, he is willing to take. 

So that we may get the capmaker's view 
and that of his fellow tenants, — for, after 
all, that is the one that counts; the state 
and the community are not nearly so much 



38 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

interested in the profits of the landlord as 
in the welfare of the workers, — suppose we 
take a stroll through a tenement house neigh- 
borhood and see for ourselves. We were in 
Stanton Street. Let us start there, then, 
going east. Towering barracks on either 
side, five, six stories high. Teeming crowds. 
Push-cart men ^* moved on" by the police- 
man, who seems to exist only for the pur- 
pose. Forsyth Street : there is a church 
on the comer, Polish and Catholic, a com- 
bination that strikes one as queer here on 
the East Side, where Polish has come to be 
synonymous with Jewish. I have cause to 
remember that corner. A man killed his wife 
in this house, and was hanged for it. Just 
across the street, on the stoop of that brown 
stone tenement, the tragedy was reenacted 
the next year ; only the murderer saved the 
county trouble and expense by taking him- 
self off, also. That other stoop in the same 
row witnessed a suicide. Why do I tell you 
these things ? Because they are true. The 
policeman here will bear me out. They 
belong to the ordinary setting of life in 
a crowd such as this. It is never so little 
worth living, and therefore held so cheap 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 39 

along with the fierce, unceasing battle that 
goes on to save it. You will go no further 
unless I leave it out ? Very well j I shall 
leave out the murder after we have passed 
the block yonder. The tragedy of that is of 
a kind that comes too close to the every-day 
Uf e of tenement house people to be omitted. 
The house caught fire in the night, and five 
were burned to death, — father, mother, and 
three children. The others got out ; why 
not they ? They stayed, it seems, to make 
sure none was left ; they were not willing to 
leave one behind, to save themselves. And 
then it was too late ; the stairs were burn- 
ing. There was no proper fire escape. That 
was where the murder came in ; but it was 
not all chargeable to the landlord, nor even 
the greater part. More than thirty years ago, 
in 1867, the state made it law that the stairs 
in every tenement four stories high should 
be fireproof, and forbade the storing of any 
inflammable material in such, houses. I do 
not know when the law was repealed, or if it 
ever was. I only know that in 1892 the Fire 
Department, out of pity for the tenants and 
regard for the safety of its own men, forced 
through an amendment to the building law, 



40 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

requiring the stairs of the common type pi 
five-story tenements to be built of fireproof 
material, and that to-day they are of wood, 
just as they always were. Only last spring 
I looked up the Superintendent of Build- 
ings and asked him what it meant. I showed 
him the law, which said that the stairs should 
be "built of slow-burning construction or 
fireproof material ; " and he put his finger 
upon the clause that follows, " as the Super- 
intendent of Buildings shaU decide." The 
law gave him discretion, and that is how he 
used it. " Hard wood burns slowly," said he. 
The fire of which I speak was a " cruller 
fire," if I remember rightly, which is to say 
that it broke out in the basement bakeshop, 
where they were boiling crullers (dough- 
nuts) in fat, at four a. m., with a hundred ten- 
ants asleep in the house above them. The fat 
went into the fire, and the rest followed. I 
suppose that I had to do with a hundred such 
fires, as a police reporter, before, under the 
protest of the Tenement House Committee 
and the Good Government Clubs, the boiling 
of fat in tenement bakeshops was forbidden. 
The chief of the Fire Department, in his tes* 
timony before the committee, said that " tene- 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 41 

ments are erected mainly with a view of re- 
turning a large income for the amount of 
capital invested. It is only after a fire in 
which great loss of life occurs that any in- 
terest whatever is taken in the safety of the 
occupants." The Superintendent of Build- 
ings, after such a fire in March, 1896, said 
that there were thousands of tenement fire- 
traps in the city. My reporter's notebook 
bears witness to the correctness of his state- 
ment, and it has many blank leaves that are 
waiting to be put to that use yet. The 
reckoning for eleven years showed that, of 
35,844 fires in New York, 53.18 per cent, 
were in tenement houses, though they were 
only a little more than 31 per cent, of all 
the buildings, and that 177 occupants were 
killed, 523 maimed, and 625 rescued by the 
firemen. Their rescue cost the lives of three 
of these brave men, and 453 were injured in 
the effort. And when all that is said, not 
the half is told. A fire in the night in one 
of those human beehives, with its terror and 
woe, is one of the things that live in the 
recollection ever after as a terrible night- 
mare. Yet the demonstration of the Tene- 
ment House Committee, that to build tene- 



43 A TEIf YEABS' WAB 

ments fireproof from the ground up would 
cost little over ten per cent, more than is 
spent upon the firetrap, and would more than 
return the interest on the extra outlay in the 
saving of insurance and repairs, and in the 
better building every way, has found no echo 
m legislation or in the practice of builders. 
That was the fire chiefs way to avoid " the 
great destruction of life ; " but he warned the 
committee that it would ^^ meet with strong 
opposition from the different interests, should 
legislation be requested." The interest of 
the man who pays the rent will not be sus- 
pected in this, so he must have meant the 
man who collects it. 

Here is a block of tenements inhabited 
by poor Jews. Most of the Jews who live 
over here are poor ; and the poorer they are, 
the higher rent do they pay, and the more 
do they crowd to make it up between them. 
** The destruction of the poor is their pov- 
erty." It is only the old story in a new set- 
ting. The slum landlord's profits were always 
the highest. He spends nothing for repairs, 
and lays the blame on the tenant. The 
^^ district leader " saves him, in these days of 
Tammany rule come back, unless he is on 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 43 

the wrong side of the political fence, in 
which case the Sanitary Code comes handy 
to chase him into camp. A big '' order " on 
his house is a very effective way of making 
a tenement house landlord discern political 
truth on the eve of an important election. 
Just before the last, when the election of 
Theodore Roosevelt was threatened, the 
sanitary force displayed such activity as it 
has not since^up to the raid on the elevated 
roads, in the examination of tenements be- 
longing very largely, as it happened, to 
sympathizers with the gallant Rough Rider's 
cause ; and those who knew did not marvel 
much at the large vote polled by the Tam- 
many candidate in the old city. 

The halls of these tenements are dark. 
Under the law, there should be a light burn- 
ing, but it is one of the rarest things to find 
one. The thing seems well-nigh impossible 
of accomplishment. Two years ago, when 
the Good Government Clubs set about back- 
ing up the Board of Health in its efforts to 
work out this reform, which comes close to 
being one of the most necessary of all, — 
such untold mischief is abroad in the dark- 
ness of these thoroughfares, — the sanitary 



44 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

police reported 12,000 tenement halls un- 
lighted by night, even, and brought them, 
by repeated orders, down to less than 1000 
in six months. I do not believe the light 
burns in 1000 of them all to-day. It is so 
easy to put it out when the policeman's back 
is turned, and save the gas. 

We had a curious instance at the time of 
the difficulties that sometimes beset reform. 
Certain halls that were known to be dark 
were reported sufficiently lighted by the 
policeman of the district, and it was dis- 
covered that it was his standard that was 
vitiated. He himself lived in a tenement, 
and was used to its gloom. So an order 
was issued defining darkness to the sanitary 
police : if the sink in the hall could be made 
out, and the slops overflowing on the floor, 
and if a baby could be seen on the stairs, 
the hall was light; if, on the other hand, 
the baby's shrieks were the first warning 
that it was being trampled upon, the hall 
was dark. Some days later, the old question 
arose about an Eldridge Street tenement. 
The policeman had reported the hall light 
enough. The president of the Board of 
Health, to settle it once for all, went over 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 45 

with me^ to see for himself. The hall was 
very dark. He sent for the policeman. 

" Did you see the sink in that hall ? " he 
asked. 

The poUceman said he did. 

" But it is pitch dark. How did you see 
it?" 

^^ I lit a match^" said the policeman. 

Four families live on these floors, with 
Heaven knows how many children. It was 
here the police commissioners were requested, 
in sober earnest, some years ago, by a com- 
mittee of very practical women philanthro- 
pists, to have the children tagged, so as to 
save the policemen wear and tear in taking 
them back and forth between the Eldridge 
Street police station and headquarters, when 
they got lost. If tagged, they could be as- 
sorted at once and taken to their homes. 
Incidentally, the city would save the expense 
of many meals. It was shrewdly suspected 
that the little ones were lost on purpose in a 
good many cases, as a way of getting them 
fed at the public expense. 

That the children preferred the excitement 
of the police station, and the distinction of a 
trip in charge of a brass-buttoned guardian, 



46 A TEN YEARS' WAB 

to the Ludlow Street flat is easy enough to 
understand. A more unlovely existence 
than that in one of these tenements it would 
be hard to imagine. Everywhere is the 
stench of the kerosene stove that is forever 
burnings serving for cookings heatings and 
ironing alike^ until the last atom of oxygen 
is burned out of the close air. Oil is cheaper 
than coal. The air shaft is too busy carry- 
ing up smells from below to bring any air 
down, even i£ it is not hung full of washing 
in every story, as it ordinarily is. Entei^ 
prisingLanTstumittouseLarefrige. 
ator as well. There is at least a draught of 
air^ such as it is. When fire breaks out^ 
this draught makes of the air shaft a flue 
through which the fire roars fiercely to the 
roof^ so transforming what was meant for 
the good of the tenants into their greatest 
peril. The stufEy rooms seem as if they were 
made for dwarfs. Most decidedly^ there is not 
room to swing the proverbial cat in any one 
of them. In one I helped the children^ last 
holiday^ to set up a Christmas tree^ so that 
a glimpse of something that was not utterly 
sordid and mean might for once enter* their 
lives. Three weeks after^ I found the tree 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 47 

standings yet in the corner. It was very cold^ 
and there was no fire in the room. "We 
were going to burn it^" said the little woman^ 
whose husband was then in the insane asy* 
lum^ " and then I could n't. It looked so 
kind o' cheery-like there in the comer." 
My tree had borne the fruit I wished. 

It remained for the New York slum land- 
lord to assess the exact value of a ray of 
sunlight, — upon the tenant, of course. Here 
are two back-to-back rear tenements, with 
dark bedrooms on the south. The flat on 
the north gives upon a neighbor's yard, and 
a hole two feet square has been knocked in 
the wall, letting in air and sunlight; little 
enough of the latter, but what there is is 
carefully computed in the lease. Six dol- 
lars for this flat, six and a half for the one 
with the hole in the wall. Six dollars a 
year per ray. In half a dozen houses in this 
block have I found the same rate maintained. 
The modern tenement on the corner goes 
higher: for four front rooms, "where the 
sun comes right in your face," seventeen 
dollars; for the rear flat of three rooms, 
larger and better every other way, but al- 
ways dark, like the capmaker's, eleven dol- 



48 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

lars. From the landlord's point of view^ 
this last is probably a concession. But he 
is a landlord with a heart. His hojcise is as 
good a one as can be built on a twenty-five- 
foot lot. The man who owns the corner 
building in Orchard Street, with the two 
adjoining tenements, has no heart. In the 
depth of last winter, I found a family of 
poor Jews Kving in a coop under his sirs, 
L abandoned ^.iece o£ U^y. in .hid! 
their baby was born, and for which he made 
them pay eight dollars a month. It was the 
most outrageous case of landlord robbery I 
had ever come across, and it gave me sincere 
pleasure to assist the sanitary policeman in 
curtailing his profits by even this much. 
The hall is not now occupied. 

The Jews under the stairs had two chil- 
dren. The shoemaker in the cellar next 
door has three. They were fighting and 
snarling like so many dogs over the coarse 
food on the table before them, when we 
looked in. The baby, it seems, was the 
cause of the row. He wanted it all. He 
was a very dirty and a very fierce baby, and 
the other two children were no match for 
him. The shoemaker grunted fretfuUy at 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 49 

his last, " Ach, he is all de time hungry ! " 
At the sight of the policeman, the young 
imp set up such a howl that we beat a hasty 
retreat. The cellar " flat '' was undoubtedly 
in violation of law, but it was allowed to 
pass. In the main hall, on the ground floor, 
we counted seventeen children. The facts of 
life here suspend ordinary landlord prejudices 
to a certain extent. Occasionally it is the 
tenant who suspends them. The policeman 
laughed as he told me of the case of a 
mother who coveted a flat into which she 
well knew her family would not be admitted ; 
the landlord was particular. She knocked, 
with a troubled face, alone. Yes, the flat 
was to let ; had she any children ? The wo- 
man heaved a sigh. " Six, but they are all 
in Greenwood." The landlord's heart was 
touched by such woe. He let her have the 
flat. By night he was amazed to find a 
flock of half a dozen robust youngsters 
domiciled under his roof. They had indeed 
been in Greenwood; but they had come 
back from the cemetery to stay. And stay 
they did, the rent being paid. 

High rents, slack work, and low wages go 
hand in hand in the tenements as promoters 



50 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

of overcrowding. The rent is always one 
fourth of the family income^ often more* 
The fierce competition for a bare living cuts 
down wages; and when loss of work is 
added^ the only thing left is to take in 
lodgers to meet the landlord's claim. The 
Jew usually takes them singly, the Italian 
by families. The midnight visit of the sani- 
tary policeman discloses a state of affairs 
against which he feels himself helpless. He 
has his standard : 400 cubic feet of air space 
for each adult sleeper, 200 for a child. That 
in itself is a concession to the practical neces- 
sities of the case. The original demand was 
for 600 feet. But of 28,000 and odd ten- 
ants canvassed in New York, in the slum* 
ming investigation prosecuted by the gen- 
eral government in 1894, 17,047 were found 
to have less than 400 feet, and of these 
5526 slept in unventilated rooms with no 
windows. No more such rooms have been 
added since ; but there has come that which 
is worse. 

It was the boast of New York, till a few 
years ago, that at least that worst of tene- 
ment depravities, the one-room house, too 
familiar in the English slums, was practi- 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 51 

cally unknown here. It is not so any longer. 
The evil began in the old houses in Orchard 
and Allen streets^ a bad neighborhood^ in- 
fested by faUen women and the tHevish 
rascals who prey upon their misery, — a 
region where the whole plan of humanity, if 
plan there be in this disgusting mess, jars 
out of tune continually. The furnished- 
room house has become an institution here, 
speeded ^ on by a conscienceless Jew who 
bought up the old buildings as fast as they 
came into the market, and filled them with a 
class of tenants before whom charity recoils, 
helpless and hopeless. When the houses 
were filled, the crowds overflowed into the 
yard. In one case, I found, in midwinter, 
tenants living in sheds built of odd boards 
and roof tin, and paying a dollar a week for 
herding with the rats. One of them, a red- 
faced German, was a philosopher after his 
kind. He did not trouble himself to get up, 
when I looked in, but stretched himself in 
his bed, — it was high noon, — responding 
to my sniff of disgust that it was ^^sehr 
schoen 1 ein bischen kalt, aber was ! " His 
neighbor, a white-haired old woman, begged, 
trembling, not to be put out. She would 



62 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

not know where to go. It was out of one 
of these houses that Fritz Meyer, the mur- 
derer, went to rob the poorbox in the Re- 
demptorist Church, the night when he killed 
policeman Smith. The policeman surprised 
him at his work. In the room he had occu- 
pied I came upon a brazen-looking woman 
with a black eye, who answered the question 
of the officer, "Where did you get that 
shiner ? " with a laugh. " I ran up against 
the fist of me man," she said. Her " man," 
a big, suUen lout, sat by, dumb. The woman 
answered for him that he was a mechanic. 

^^ What does he work at ? " snorted the 
policeman, restraining himself with an effort 
from kicking the fellow. 

She laughed scornfully. "At the junk 
business." It meant that he was a thief. 

Young men, with blotched faces and ca- 
daverous looks, were loafing in every room. 
They hung their heads in silence. The wo- 
men turned their faces away at the sight of 
the uniform. They cling to these wretches, 
who exploit their starved affections for their 
own ease, with a grip of desperation. It is 
their last hold. Women have to love some- 
thing. It is their deepest degradation that 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 63 

they must love these. Even the wretches 
themselves feel the shame of it^ and repay 
them by beating and robbing them, as their 
daily occupation. A poor little baby in one 
of the rooms gave a shuddering human touch 
to it all. 

The old houses began it, as they began 
all the tenement mischief that has come 
upon New York. But the opportunity that 
was made by the tenant's need was not one 
to be neglected. In some of the newer tene- 
ments, with their smaller rooms, the lodger 
is by this time provided for in the plan, with 
a special entrance from the hall. " Lodger '* 
comes, by an easy transition, to stand for 
"family." Only the other night I went 
with the sanitary police on their midnight 
inspection through a row of Elizabeth Street 
tenements which I had known since they 
were built, fifteen or sixteen years ago. 
That is the neighborhood in which the 
recent Italian immigrants crowd. In the 
house which we selected for examination, in 
all respects the type of the rest, we found 
forty-three families where there should have 
been sixteen. Upon each floor were four 
flats^ and in each flat three rooms that mea* 



N 



64 A TEN TEABS' WAR 

Bured respectively 14x11, 7x11, and 7x8^ 
feet. In only one flat did we find a single 
family. In three there were two to each. 
In the other twelve each room had its own 
family living and sleeping there. They 
cooked^ I suppose^ at the one stove in the 
kitchen, which was the largest room. In 
one big bed we counted six persons^ the 
parents and four children. Two of them 
lay crosswise at the foot of the bed^ or there 
would not have been room. A curtain was 
hung before the bed in each of the two 
smaller rooms^ leaving a passageway from 
the hall to the main room. The rent for 
the front flats was twelve dollars ; for that 
in the rear ten dollars. The social distinc- 
tions going with the advantage of location 
were rigidly observed, I suppose. The three 
steps across a tenement hall, from the front 
to " the back," are often a longer road than 
from Ludlow Street to Fifth Avenue. 

They were sweaters' tenements. But I 
shall keep that end of the story until I come 
to speak of the tenants. The houses I have 
in mind now. They were Astor leasehold 
property, and I had seen them built upon 
the improved plan of 1879, with air shafts 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 55 

and all that* There had not been water in 
the tenements for a month then^ we were 
told by the one tenant who spoke English 
that could be understood. The cold snap 
had locked the pipes. Fitly enough^ the 
lessee was an undertaker, an Italian himseU, 
who combined with his business of housing 
his people above and below the ground that 
of the padrone, to let no profit sKp. He 
had not taken the trouble to make many 
or recent repairs. The bmldings had made 
a fair start; they promised well. But the 
promise had not been kept. In their pre- 
mature decay they were distinctly as bad as 
the worst. I had the curiosity to seek out 
the agent, the middleman, and ask him why 
they were so. He shrugged his shoulders. 
With such tenants nothing could be done, 
he said. I have always held that Italians 
are most manageable, and that, with all the 
surface indications to the contrary, they are 
really inclined to cleanliness, if cause can be 
shown, and I told him so. He changed the 
subject diplomatically. No doubt it was 
with him simply a question of the rent. 
They might crowd and carry on as they 
pleased, once that was paid ; and they did. 



66 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

It used to be the joke of Elizabeth Street 
that when the midnight police came, the ten- 
ants would keep them waiting outside, pre- 
tending to search for the key, until the sur- 
plus population of men had time to climb 
down the fire escape. When the police were 
gone they came back. We surprised them 
all in bed. 

like most of the other tenements we have 
come across on our trip, these were double- 
deckers. That is the type of tenement that 
is responsible for the crowding that goes 
on unchecked. It is everywhere replacing 
the older barracks, as they rot or are torn 
down. 

This double-decker was thus described by 
the Tenement House Committee of 1894: 
"It is the one hopeless form of tenement 
construction. It cannot be well ventilated, 
it cannot be well lighted ; it is not safe in 
case of fire. It is built on a lot 25 feet 
wide by 100 or less in depth, with apart- 
ments for four families in each story. This 
necessitates the occupation of from 86 to 90 
per cent, of the lot's depth. The stairway, 
made in the centre of the house, and the 
necessary walls and partitions reduce the 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 67 

width of the middle rooms (which serve as 
bedrooms for at least two people each) to 
9 feet each at the most^ and a narrow light 
and air shafts now legally required in the 
centre of each side wall^ still further lessens 
the floor space of these middle rooms. Di- 
rect light is only possible for the rooms at 
the front and rear. The middle rooms must 
borrow what light they can from dark hall- 
ways, the shallow shafts, and the rear rooms. 
Their air must pass through other rooms or 
the tiny shafts, and cannot but be contami- 
nated before it reaches them. A five-story 
house of this character contains apartments 
for eighteen or twenty families, a population 
frequently amounting to 100 people, and 
sometimes increased by boarders or lodgers 
to 150 or more." 

The committee, after looking in vain 
through the slums of the Old World cities 
for something to compare the double-deckers 
with, declared that, in their setting, the sepa- 
rateness and sacredness of home life were 
interfered with, and evils bred, physical and 
moral^ that ^^ conduce to the corruption of 
the young." The statement needs no argu- 
ment to convince. 



58 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

Yet it is for these that the " interests " of 
which the fire chief spoke rush into battle at 
ahnost every session of the legislature, when- 
ever a step, no matter how short and con- 
servative, is to be taken toward their im- 
provement. No winter has passed, since the 
awakening conscience of the people of New 
York city manifested itself in a desire to 
better the lot of the other half, that has not 
seen an assault made, in one shape or an- 
other, on the structure of tenement house 
law built up with such anxious solicitude. 
Once a bill to exempt from police supervi- 
sion, by withdrawing them from the tene- 
ment house class, the very worst of the 
houses, whose death rate threatened the com- 
munity, was sneaked through the legislature 
all unknown, and had reached the executive 
before the alarm was sounded. The gov- 
ernor, put upon his guard, returned the 
bill, with the indorsement that he was unable 
to understand what could have prompted 
a measure that seemed to have reason and 
every argument against it, and none for it. 
But the motive is not so obscure, after all. 
It is the same old one of profit without con- 
science. It took from the Health Depart- 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 59 

ment the supervision of the Kght, ventila- 
tion^ and plumbing, of the tenements^ which 
by right belonged there, and put it in charge 
of a compliant Building Department, "for 
the convenience of architects and their cli- 
ents, and the saving of time and expense to 
them." For the convenience of the archi- 
tect's client, the builder, the lot was en- 
croached upon, until of one big block which 
the Tenement House Committee measured 
only 7 per cent, was left uncovered for the 
air to struggle through ; 93 per cent, of it 
was covered with brick and mortar. Bear 
tenements, to the number of nearly 100, 
have been condemned as " slaughter houses," 
with good reason, but this block was built 
practically solid. The average of space cov- 
ered in 34 tenement blocks was shown to 
be 78.13 per cent. The law allowed only 
65. The " discretion " that pens tenants in 
a burning tenement with stairs of wood 
for the builder's "convenience" cut down 
the chance of life of their babies unmoved. 
Sunlight and air mean just that, where three 
thousand human beings are packed into a 
single block. That was why the matter 
was given into the charge of the health 



eo A TEN YEARS* WAR 

officials^ when politics was yet kept out of 
their work. 

Of such kind are the interests that oppose 
betterment of the worker's hard lot in New 
York; that dictated the appointment by 
Tammany of a commission composed of 
builders to revise its code of building laws^ 
and that sneer at the ^^ laughable results 
of the late Tenement House Committee." 
Those results made for the health and hap- 
piness and safety of a million and a half of 
souls, and were accounted, on every humane 
ground, the longest step forward that had 
yet been taken by this community. For the 
old absentee landlord, who did not know 
what mischief was afoot, we have got the 
speculative builder, who does know, but does 
not care so long as he gets his pound of 
flesh. Half of the just laws that have been 
passed for the relief of the people he has 
paralyzed with his treacherous discretion 
clause, carefully nursed in the school of 
practical politics to which he gives faithful 
adherence. The thing has been the curse 
of our city from the day when the ear- 
liest struggle toward better things began. 
Among the first manifestations of that was 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 61 

the prohibition of soap factories below 
Grand Street by the act of 1797, which 
created a Board of Health with police 
powers. The act was passed in February, 
to take effect in July ; but long before that 
time the same legislature had amended it by 
giving the authorities discretion in the mat- 
ter. And the biggest soap factory of them 
all is down there to this day, and is even 
now stirring up a rumpus among the latest 
immigrants, the Syrians, who have settled 
about it. No doubt it is all a question of 
political education; but are not a hundred 
years enough to settle this much, that com- 
promise is out of place where the lives of 
the people are at stake, and that it is time 
our years of "discretion'* were numbered? 
And, please God, the time is at hand. 
Here, set in its frame of swarming tene- 
ments, is a wide open space, some time, 
when enough official red tape has been un- 
wound, to be a park, with flowers and grass 
and birds to gladden the hearts of those to 
whom such things have been as tales that 
are told, all these dreary years, and with a 
playground in which the chUdren of yonder 
big school may roam at will, undismayed by 



62 A TEN YEARS* WAR 

landlord or policeman. Not all the forces 
of reaction can put back the barracks that 
were torn down as one of the ^^ laughable 
results '* of that very Tenement House Com- 
mittee's work, or restore to the undertaker 
his profits from Bone Alley of horrid mem- 
ory. It was the tenant's turn to laugh, that 
time. Down half a dozen blocks, among 
even denser swarms, is another such plot, 
where football and a skating pond are being 
planned by the children's friends. We shall 
hear the story of these yet, and rejoice that 
the day of reckoning is coming for the 
builder without a soul. Till then let him 
deck the fronts of his tenements with brav- 
ery of plate glass and brass to hide the dark- 
ness within. He has done his worst. 

We can go no further. Yonder lies the 
river. A full mile we have come, through un- 
broken ranks of tenements with their mighty, 
pent-up multitudes. Here they seem, with a 
common impulse, to overflow into the street. 
Prom corner to comer it is crowded with 
girls and children draggiug babies nearly as 
big as themselves, with desperate endeavor 
to lose nothing of the show. There is a 
funeral in the block. Unnumbered sewing*- 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 63 

machines cease for once their tireless rivahy 
with the flour mill in the next blocks that is 
forever grinding in a vain effort to catch up. 
Heads are poked from windows. On the 
stoops hooded and shawled figures have 
front seats. The crowd is hardly restrained 
by the poUceman and the undertaker in hoU- 
day mourning, who clear a path by force 
to the plumed hearse. The eager haste, 
the frantic rush to see, — what does it not 
tell of these starved lives, of the quality of 
their aims and ambitions ? The mill clatters 
loudly : there is one mouth less to fill. In 
the midst of it all, with clamor of urgent 
gong, the patrol wagon rounds the comer, 
carrying two poHcemen precariously perched 
upon a struggling " drunk," a woman. The 
crowd scatters, following the new sensation. 
The tragedies of death and life in the slum 
have met together. 

Many a mile I might lead you along these 
rivers, east and west, through the island 
of Manhattan, and find little else than we 
have seen. The great crowd is yet below 
Fourteenth Street, but the northward march 
knows no slackening of pace. As the tide 
sets uptown, it reproduces faithfully the 



64 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

scenes of the older wards, though with less 
of theur human interest than here where the 
old houses, in all their ugliness, have yet 
some imprint of the individuality of their 
tenants. Only on feast days does Little 
Italy, in Harlem, recall the Bend when it 
put on holiday attire. Anything more deso- 
late and disheartening than the unending 
rows of tenements, all alike and all equally 
repellent, of the uptown streets, it is hard 
to imagine. Hell's Kitchen in its ancient 
wickedness was picturesque, at least, with its 
rocks and its goats and shanties. Since the 
negroes took possession it is only dull, except 
when, as happened last summer, the remnant 
of the Irish settlers make a stand against the 
intruders. Vain hope! Perpetual eviction 
is their destiny. Negro, Italian, and Jew, 
biting the dust with many a bruised head 
under the Hibernian's stalwart fist, resist- 
lessly drive him before them, nevertheless, 
out of house and home. The landlord pock- 
ets the gate money. The old robbery still 
goes on. Where the negro pitches his tent, 
he pays more rent than his white neighbor 
next door, and is a better tenant. And he 
is good game forever. He never buys the 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 65 

tenement^ as the Jew or the Italian is likely 
to do, when he has scraped up money 
enough to reenact, after his own fashion, 
the trick taught him by his oppressor. The 
black column has reached the hundredth 
street on the East Side, and the sixties on 
the West,^ and there for the present it halts. 
Jammed between Africa, Italy, and Bohe- 
mia, the Irishman has abandoned the East 
Side uptown. Only west of Central Park 
does he yet face his foe, undaunted in de- 
feat as in victory. The local street nomen- 
clature, in which the directory has no hand, 
— Nigger Row, Mixed Ale Flats, etc., — 
indicates the hostUe camps with unerring 
accuracy. 

Uptown or downtown, as the tenements 
grow taller, the thing that is rarest to find 
is the home of the olden days, even as it 
was in the shanty on the rocks. " No home, 
no family, no morality, no manhood, no 
patriotism ! " said the old Frenchman. Sev- 
enty-seven per cent, of their young prisoners, 
say the managers of the state reformatory, 

^ There is an advanced outpost of blacks as far up as 
One Hundred and Forty-Fifth Street, but the main body 
lingers yet among the sixties. 



66 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

have no moral sense^ or next to none. 
^^ Weakness^ not wickedness^ ails them," 
adds the prison chaplain ; no manhood, that 
is to say. Years ago, roaming through the 
British Museum, I came upon an exhibit 
that riveted my attention as nothing else 
had. It was a huge stone arm, torn from 
the shoulder of some rock image, with 
doubled fist and every rigid muscle instinct 
with angry menace. Where it came from 
or what was its story I do not know. I did 
not ask. It was its message to us I was 
trying to read. I had been spending weary 
days and nights in the slums of London, 
where hatred grew, a noxious crop, upon the 
wreck of the home. Lying there, mute and 
menacing, the great fist seemed to me like a 
shadow thrown from the gray dawn of the 
race into our busy day with a purpose, a 
grim, unheeded warning. What was it ? In 
the slum the question haunts me yet. They 
perished, the empires those rock-hewers built, 
and the governments reared upon their ruins 
are long since dead and forgotten. They 
were bom to die, for they were not built 
upon human happiness, but upon human 



THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 67 

terror and greed. We built ours upon the 
bed rock, and its cornerstone is the home. 
With this bitter mockery of it that makes 
the slum, can it be that the warning is in- 
deed for us ? 



m 



THE tenement: curing its blight 

I STOOD at Seven Dials and heard the 
policeman's account of what it used to be. 
Seven Dials is no more like the slum of old 
than is the Five Points to-day. The con- 
science of London wrought upon the one as 
the conscience of New York upon the other. 
A mission house, a children's refuge, two 
big schools, and, hard by, a public bath 
and a wash house stand as the record of 
the battle with the slum, which, with these 
forces in the field, has but one ending. The 
policeman's story rambled among the days 
when things were different. Then it was 
dangerous for an officer to go alone there at 
night. 

Around the corner there came from one 
of the side streets a procession with ban- 
ners, parading in honor and aid of some 
church charity. We watched it pass. In it 
marched young men and boys with swords 



THE TENEMENT : CURING ITS BLIGHT 09 

and battle-axes, and upon its outskirts skipped 
a host of young roughs — so one would have 
called them but for the evidence of their 
honest employment — who rattled collection 
boxes, reaping a harvest of pennies from far 
and near. I looked at the battle-axes and 
the collection boxes, and thought of forty 
years ago. Where were the Seven Dials of 
that day, and the men who gave it its bad 
name ? I asked the policeman. 

" They were druv into decency, sor," he 
said, and answered from his own experience 
the question ever asked by faint-hearted phi- 
lanthropists. " My father, he done duty here 
afore me in '45. The worst dive was where 
that church stands. It was always full of 
thieves," — whose sons, I added mentally, 
have become collectors for the church. The 
one fact was a whole chapter on the slum. 

London's way with the tenant we adopted 
at last in New York with the slum landlord. 
He was ^* druv into decency." We had to. 
Moral suasion had been stretched to the 
limit. The point had been reached where 
one knock-down blow outweighed a bushel 
of arguments. It was all very well to build 
model tenements as object lessons to show 



70 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

that the thing could be done ; it had become 
necessary to enforce the lesson by demon- 
strating that the community had power to 
destroy houses which were a menace to its 
life. The rear tenements were chosen for 
this purpose. 

They were the worst as they were the 
first of New York's tenements. The double- 
deckers of which I have spoken had^ with 
all their evils, at least this to their credit, 
that their death rate was not nearly as high 
as that of the old houses. That was not 
because of any virtue inherent in the double- 
deckers, but because the earlier tenements 
were old, and built in a day that knew no- 
thing of sanitary restrictions, and cared less. 
Hence the showing that the big tenements 
had much the lowest mortality. The death 
rate does not sound the depths of tenement 
house evils, but it makes a record that is 
needed when it comes to attacking property 
rights. The mortality of the rear tenements 
had long been a scandal. They are built in 
the back yard, generally back to back with 
the rear buildings on abutting lots. If there 
is an open space between them, it is never 
more than a slit a foot or so wide, and gets 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 71 

to be the receptacle of garbage and filth of 
every kind; so that any opening made in 
these walls for purposes of ventilation be- 
comes a source of greater danger than if there 
were none. The last count that was made, 
in 1898, showed that among the 40,958 
tenements in New York there were still 
2379 rear houses left. Where they are the 
death rate rises, for reasons that are apparent. 
The sun cannot reach them. They are damp 
and dark, and the tenants, who are always 
the poorest and most crowded, live ^^ as in a 
cage open only toward the front," said the 
Tenement House Committee. A canvass 
made of the mortality records by Dr. Roger 
S. Tracy, the registrar of records, showed 
that while in the First Ward (the oldest), 
for instance, the death rate in houses stand- 
ing singly on the lot was 29.03 per 1000 of 
the Uving, where there were rear houses it 
rose to 61.97. The infant death rate is a 
still better test : that rose from 109.58 in 
the single tenements of the same ward to 
204.54 where there were rear houses. One 
in every five babies had to die, that is to 
say ; the house killed it. No wonder the com- 
mittee styled the rear tenements ^^ slaughter 



72 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

houses/' and called upon the legislature to 
root them out^ and with them every old^ 
ramshackle^ disease-breeding tenement in the 
city. 

A law which is in substance a copy of the 
English act for destroying slum property 
was passed in the spring of 1895. It pro- 
vides for the seizure of buildings that are 
dangerous to the public health or unfit for 
human habitation^ and their destruction 
upon proper proof, with compensation to 
the owner on a sUdihg scale down to the 
point of entire unfitness, when he is entitled 
only to the value of the material in his 
house. Up to that time, the only way to 
get rid of such a house had been to declare 
it a nuisance under the sanitary code; but 
as the city could not very well pay for the 
removal of a nuisance, to order it down 
seemed too much like robbery ; so the owner 
was allowed to keep it. It takes time and 
a good many lives to grow a sentiment such 
as this law expressed. The Anglo-Saxon 
respect for vested rights is strong in us, 
also. I remember going through a ragged 
school in London, once, and finding the eyes 
of the children in the infant class red and 



THE TENEMENT : CURING ITS BLIGHT 73 

sore. Suspecting some contagion, I made 
inquiries, and was told that a collar factory 
next door was the cause of the trouble. 
The fumes from it poisoned the children's 
eyes. 

"And you allow it to stay, and let this 
thing go on ? " I asked, in wonder. 

The superintendent shrugged his shoul- 
ders. " It is their factory," he said. 

I was on the point of saying something 
that might not have been polite, seeing that 
I was a guest, when I remembered that, in 
the newspaper which I carried in my pocket, 
I had just been reading a plea of some hon- 
orable M. P. for a much-needed reform in 
the system of counsel fees, then being agi- 
tated in the House of Commons. The reply 
of the solicitor general had made me laugh. 
He was inclined to agree with the honorable 
member, but still preferred to follow prece- 
dent by referring the matter to the Inns of 
Court. Quite incidentally, he mentioned 
that the matter had been hanging fire in the 
House two hundred years. It seemed very 
English to me then ; but when we afterward 
came to tackle our rear tenements, and in 
the first batch there was a row which I knew 



74 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

to have been picked out by the sanitary in- 
spector, twenty-five years before, as fit only 
to be destroyed, I recognized that we were 
kin, after all. 

That was Gotham Court. It was first on 
the list, and the Mott Street Barracks came 
next, when, as executive officer of the Good 
Government Clubs, I helped the Board of 
Health put the law to the test the following 
year. The Health Department kept a list 
of 66 old houses, with a population of 5460 
tenants, in which there had been 1313 
deaths in a little over five years (1889-94). 
Prom among them we picked our lot, and 
the department drove the tenants out. The 
owners went to law, one and all; but, to 
their surprise and dismay, the courts held 
with the health officers. The moral effect 
was instant and overwhelming. Bather than 
keep up the fight, with no rent coming 
in, the landlords surrendered at discretion. 
In consideration of this, compensation was 
allowed them at the rate of about a thou- 
sand dollars a house, although they were 
really entitled only to the value of the old 
material. The buildings all came under the 
head of "wholly unfit." Gotham Court, 




THE MOIT STREKT BARRACKS 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 75 

with its sixteen buildings, in which, thirty- 
five years ago, a health inspector counted 
146 cases of sickness, including " all kinds of 
infectious disease," was bought for $19,750, 
and Mullen's Court, adjoining, for $7251. 
They had been under civilized management 
since, but nothing decent could be made out 
of them. To show the character of all, let 
two serve ; in each case it is the official re- 
cord, upon which seizure was made, that is 
quoted : — 

No. 98 Catherine Street: "The floor in 
the apartments and the wooden steps lead- 
ing to the second-floor apartment are broken, 
loose, saturated with filth. The roof and 
eaves gutters leak, rendering the apartments 
wet. The two apartments on the first floor 
consist of one room each, in which the ten- 
ants are compelled to cook, eat, and sleep. 
The back walls are defective ; the house wet 
and damp, and unfit for human habitation. 
It robs the surrounding houses of light." 

" The sunlight never enters " was the con- 
stant refrain. 

No. 17 Sullivan Street : " Occupied by 
the lowest whites and negroes, living to- 
gether. The houses are decayed from cellar 



76 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

to garret, and filthy beyond description, — 
the filthiest, in fact, we have ever seen. The 
beams, the floors, the plaster on the walls, 
where there is any plaster, are rotten and 
alive with vermin. They are a menace to 
the pubhc health, and cannot be repaired. 
Their annual death rate in five years was 
41.38." 

The sunlight enters where these stood, at 
all events, and into 58 other yards that once 
were plague spots. Of 94 rear tenements 
seized that year, 60 have been torn down, 33 
of them voluntarily by the owners; 29 were 
remodeled and allowed to stand, chiefly as 
workshops; 5 other houses were standing 
empty, and yielding no rent, in March, 1899. 
The worst of them all, the Mott Street Bar- 
racks, are yet in the courts ; but all the 
judges and juries in the land have no power 
to put them back. It is a case of " They 
can't put you in jail for that" — " Yes, but 
I am in jail." They are gone, torn down 
under the referee's decision that they ought 
to go, before the Appellate Division called 
a halt. In 1888 I counted 360 tenants in 
these tenements, front and rear, all Italians, 
and the infant death rate of the Barracks 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 77 

that year was 325 per 1000. There were 
forty babies^ and one in three of them had 
to die. The general infant death rate for 
the whole tenement house population that 
year was 88.38. In the four years follow- 
ing, during which the population and the 
death rate of the houses were both reduced 
with an effort, fifty-one funerals went out of 
the Barracks. With entire fitness, a ceme- 
tery corporation held the mortgage upon the 
property. The referee allowed it the price 
of opening one grave, in the settlement, 
gave one dollar to the lessee and one hun- 
dred and ten dollars to the landlord, who 
refused to collect, and took his case to the 
Court of Appeals, where it is to be argued 
this summer. The only interest that at- 
taches to it, since the real question has been 
decided by the wrecker ahead of time, is 
the raising of the constitutional point, per- 
chance, and the issue of that is not doubt- 
ful. The law has been repeatedly upheld, 
and in Massachusetts, where similar action 
has been taken since, the constitutionality 
of it has in no case been attacked, so far as 
I know. 

I have said before that I do not believe 



78 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

in paying the slum kncQord for taking his 
hand off our throats^ when we have got the 
grip on him in turn. Mr. Roger Foster, 
who as a member of the Tenement House 
Committee drew the law^ and as counsel for 
the Health Department fought the landlords 
successfully in the courts, holds to the oppo- 
site view. I am bound to say that instances 
turned up in which it did seem a hardship 
to deprive the owners of even such property, 
I remember especially a tenement in Roose- 
velt Street, which was the patrimony and 
whole estate of two children. With the 
rear house taken away, the income from the 
front would not be enough to cover the in- 
terest on the mortgage. It was one of those 
things that occasionally make standing upon 
abstract principle so very uncomfortable. I 
confess I never had the courage to ask what 
was done in their case. I know that the 
tenement went, and I hope — Well, never 
mind what I hope. It has nothing to do 
with the case. The house is down, and the 
main issue decided upon its merits. 

In the 94 tenements (counting the front 
houses in ; they cannot be separated from 
the rear tenements in the death registry) 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 79 

there were in five years 956 deaths^ a rate 
of 62.9 at a time when the general city death 
rate was 24.63. It was the last and heaviest 
blow aimed at the abnormal mortality of a 
city that ought, by reason of many advan- 
tages, to be one of the healthiest in the 
world. With clean streets, pure milk, med- 
ical school inspection, antitoxin treatment 
of deadly diseases, and better sanitary meth- 
ods generally ; with the sunlight let into its 
slums, and its worst plague spots cleaned 
out, the death rate of New York came down 
from 26.32 per 1000 inhabitants in 1887 to 
19.53 in 1897. Inasmuch as a round half 
million was added to its population within 
the ten years, it requires little figuring to 
show that the number whose lives were lit- 
erally saved by reform would people a city 
of no mean proportions. The extraordinary 
spell of hot weather, two years ago, brought 
out the full meaning of this. While many 
were killed by sunstroke, the population as 
a whole was shown to have acquired, in bet- 
ter hygienic surroundings, a much greater 
power of resistance. It yielded slowly to the 
heat. Where two days had been sufficient, 
in former years, to send the death rate up, 



80 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

it now took five; and the infant mortality 
remained low throughout the dreadful trial. 
Perhaps the substitution of beer for whis- 
key as a summer drink had something to 
do with it ; but Colonel Waring's broom 
and unpolitical sanitation had more. Since 
it spared him so many voters, the politician 
ought to have been grateful for this ; but 
he was not. Death rates are not as good 
political arguments as tax rates, we found 
out. In the midst of it all, a policeman 
whom I knew went to his Tammany cap- 
tain to ask if Good Government Clubs were 
pohtical clubs within the meaning of the 
law, which prohibits policemen from joining 
such. The answer he received set me to 
thinking : " Yes, the meanest, worst kind 
of pohtical clubs, they are." Yet they had 
done nothing worse than to save the babies, 
the captain's with the rest. 

The landlord read the signs better. He 
learned his lesson quickly. All over the city, 
he made haste to set his house to rights, lest 
it be seized or brought to the bar in other 
ways. The Good Government Clubs did not 
rest content with their first victory. They 
made war upon the dark hall in the double- 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 81 

decker^ and upon the cruller bakery. They 
opened small parks, exposed the abuses of 
the civil courts, the "poor man's courts," 
urged on the building of new schools, com- 
pelled the cleaning of the Tombs prison and 
hastened the demolition of the wicked old 
pile, and took a hand in evolving a sensi- 
ble and humane system of dealing with the 
young vagrants who were going to waste 
on free soup. The proposition to establish 
a farm colony for their reclamation was met 
with the challenge at Albany that " we have 
had enough reform in New York city," and, 
as the event proved, for the time being we 
had really gone as far as we could. But 
even that was a good long way. Some 
things had been nailed that could never 
again be undone ; and hand in hand with 
the effort to destroy had gone another to 
build up, that promised to set us far enough 
ahead to appeal at last successfully to the 
self-interest of the builder, if not to his 
humanity ; or, failing that, to compel him 
to decency. If that promise has not been 
kept, the end is not yet. I believe it will 
be kept. 

The movement for reform, in the matter 



82 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

of housing the people^ had proceeded upon 
a clearly outlined plan that apportioned to 
each of several forces its own share of the 
work. At a meeting held under the au- 
spices of the Association for Improving the 
Condition of the Poor, early in the days of 
the movement, the field had been gone over 
thoroughly. To the Good Government Clubs 
fell the task, as already set forth, of com- 
pelling the enforcement of the existing ten- 
ement house laws. D. 0. Mills, the philan- 
thropic banker, declared his purpose to build 
hotels which should prove that a bed and 
lodging as good as any could be furnished 
to the great army of homeless men at a price 
that would compete with the cheap lodging 
houses, and yet yield a profit to the owner. 
On behalf of a number of well-known capital- 
ists, who had been identified with the cause 
of tenement house reform for years, Robert 
Fulton Cutting, the president of the Asso- 
ciation for Improving the Condition of the 
Poor, offered to build homes for the working 
people that should be worthy of the name, 
on a large scale. A company was formed, 
and chose for its president Dr. Elgin R. L. 
Gould, author of the government report on 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 83 

the Housing of the Working People, the 
standard work on the subject. A million 
dollars were raised by public subscription, 
and operations were begun at once. 

Two ideas were kept in mind as funda- 
mental : one, that charity that will not pay 
will not stay; the other, that nothing can 
be done with the twenty-five-foot lot. It is 
the primal curse of our housing system, and 
any effort toward better things must reckon 
with it first. Nineteen lots on Sixty-Eighth 
and Sixty-Ninth streets, west of Tenth Ave- 
nue, were purchased of Mrs. Alfred Corn- 
ing Clark, who took one tenth of the capi- 
tal stock of the City and Stfburban Homes 
Company; and upon these was erected the 
first block of tenements. This is the neigh- 
borhood toward which the population has 
been setting with ever increasing congestion. 
Already in 1895 the Twenty-Second Ward 
contained nearly 200,000 souls. Between 
Forty-Ninth and Sixty-Second streets, west 
of Ninth Avenue, there are at least five 
blocks with more than 3000 tenants in each, 
and the conditions of the notorious Tenth 
Ward are certain to be reproduced here, if 
indeed they are not exceeded. In the Fif- 



84 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

teenth Assembly District, some distance be- 
low, but on the same line, the first socio- 
logical canvass of the Federation of Churches 
had found the churches, schools, and other 
educational agencies marshaling a frontage 
of 756 feet on the street, while the saloon 
fronts stretched themselves over nearly a 
mile ; so that, said the compiler of these 
pregnant facts, ^^ saloon social ideals are mint- 
ing themselves in the minds of the people 
at the ratio of seven saloon thoughts to one 
educational thought." It would not have 
been easy to find a spot better fitted for 
the experiment of restoring to the home its 
rights. 

The Alfred Corning Clark Buildings, as 
they were called in recognition of the sup- 
port of this public-spirited woman, have been 
occupied a year. When I went through 
them, the other day, I found all but five of 
the 373 apartments they contain occupied, 
and a very large waiting list of applicants 
for whom there was no room. The doctor 
alone, of all the tenants, had moved away, 
disappointed. He had settled on the estate, 
hoping to build up a practice among so many ; 
but he could not make a living. The plan 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 85 

of the buildings, for which Ernest Magg, a 
young and energetic architect, with a very 
practical interest in the welfare of the Other 
Half, has the credit, seems to me to realize 
the ideal of making homes under a com- 
mon roof. The tenants appeared to take 
the same view of it. They were a notably 
contented lot. Their only objection was to 
the use of the comjnon tubs in the base? 
ment laundry, — a sign that, to my mind, 
was rather favorable than otherwise, though 
it argued ill for the scheme of public wash 
houses on the Glasgow plan that has seemed 
so promising. They were selected tenants 
as to trustworthiness and desirabiUty on that 
score, but they were all of the tenement 
house class. The rents are a little lower 
than for much poorer quarters in the sur- 
rounding tenements. The houses are built 
around central courts, with Kght and air in 
abundance, with fireproof stairs and steamr 
heated halls. There is not a dark passage 
anywhere. Within, there is entire privacy 
for the tenant ; the partitions are deadened, 
so that sound is not transmitted from one 
apartment to another. Without, the houses 
have none of the discouraging barrack look. 



86 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

The architecture is distinctly pleasing. The 
few and simple rules laid down by the man- 
agement have been readily compUed with, as 
making for the benefit of aU. A woman col- 
lects the rents, which are paid weekly in ad- 
vance. The promise that the property will 
earn the five per cent, to which the com- 
pany limits its dividends seems certain to be 
kept. There is nothing in sight to prevent 
it, everything to warrant the prediction. 

The capital stock has since been increased 
to $2,000,000, and the erection has been 
begun of a new block of buildings in East 
Sixty-Fourth Street, within hail of Battle 
Kow, of anciently warlike memory. James 
E. Ware & Son, the architects who, in the 
competition of 1879, won the prize for the 
improved tenements that marked the first 
departure from the boxlike barracks of old, 
drew the plans, embodying aU the good 
features of the Clark Buildings with attrac- 
tions of their own. A suburban colony is 
being developed by the company, in addition. 
It is not the least promising feature of its 
work that a very large proportion of its 
shareholders are workingmen, who have in- 
vested their savings in the enterprise, thus 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 87 

bearmg witness to their faith and interest in 
it. Of the entire number of shareholders at 
the time of the first annual report, forty-five 
per cent, held less than ten shares each. 

The success of these and previous efforts 
at the building of model tenements has had 
the desired effect of encouraging other at- 
tempts in the same direction. They repre- 
sent the best that can be done in fighting 
the slum within the city. Homewood, the 
City and Suburban Homes Company's settle- 
ment in the country, stands for the way out 
that must eventually win the fight. That is 
the track that must be followed, and will be 
when we have found in rapid transit the key 
to the solution of our present perplexities. 
" In the country " hardly describes the site 
of the colony. It is within the Greater City, 
on Long Island, hardly an hour's journey by 
trolley from the City Hall, and only a short 
walk from the bay. Here the company has 
built a hundred cottages, and has room for 
two or three hundred more. Of the hundred 
houses, seventy-two had been sold when I 
was there last winter. They are handsome 
and substantial little houses, the lower story 
of brick, the upper of timber and stucco. 



88 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

each cottage standing in its own garden. 
The purchaser pays for the property in 
monthly payments extending over twenty 
years. A plan of life insurance^ which pro- 
tects the family and the company alike in 
the event of the death of the bread-winner, 
is included in the arrangement. The price 
of the cottages which so far have found 
owners has averaged about $3100, and the 
monthly installment, including the insurance 
premium, a trifle over $25. It follows that 
the poorest have not moved to Homewood. 
Its settlers include men with an income of 
$1200 or $1500 a year, — policemen, pilots, 
letter carriers, clerks, and teachers. This is 
as it should be. They represent the gradu- 
ating class, as it were, from the city crowds. 
It is the province of the philanthropic tene- 
ment to prepare the next lot for moving up 
and out. Any attempt to hasten the process 
by taking a short cut could result only in 
failure and disappointment. The graduating 
class is large enough, however, to guarantee 
that it will not be exhausted by one Home- 
wood. Before the houses were contracted 
for, without advertising or effort of any kind 
to make the thing known, more than eight 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 89 

hundred wage earners had asked to have 
their names put on the books as applicants 
for suburban homes. 

Others had built model tenements and 
made them pay, but it was left to Mr. D. 0. 
Mills to break ground in the field which 
Lord Rowton had filled with such signal suc- 
cess in London. The two Mills Houses, in 
Bleecker and Rivington streets, are as wide 
a departure as could well be imagined from 
the conventional type of lodging houses in 
New York. They are large and beautiful 
structures, which, for the price of a cot in 
one of the Bowery barracks, furnish their 
lodgers with as good a bed in a private room 
as the boarder in the Waldorf-Astoria enjoys. 
Indeed, it is said to be the very same in 
make and quality. There are baths without 
stint, smoking and writing rooms and games, 
and a free library ; a laundry for those who 
can pay for having their washing done, and 
a separate one for such as prefer to do it 
themselves. There is a restaurant in the 
basement, in which a regular dinner of good 
quality is served at fifteen cents. The 
night's lodging is twenty cents. The dearest 
Bowery lodging houses charge twenty-five 



90 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

cents. The bedrooms are necessarily small, 
but they are clean and comfortable, well 
lighted and heated. The larger house, 
No. 1, in Bleecker Street, has room for 1554 
guests ; No. 2, in Rivington Street, for 600. 
Though this represents more than twelve 
per cent, of the capacity of aU the cheap 
lodging houses in the city, hoik have been 
filled since they were opened, and crowds 
have often been turned away. The Bowery 
" hotels " have felt the competition. Their 
owners deny it, but the fact is apparent in 
efforts at improvements with which they 
were not justly chargeable before. Only 
the lowest, the ten-cent houses, are exempt 
from this statement. These attract a class 
of custom for which the Mills Houses do not 
compete. The latter are intended for the 
large number of decent mechanics, laborers, 
and men of smaU means, hunting for work, 
who are always afloat in a large city, and 
who neither seek nor wish charity. The 
plan and purpose of the builder cannot be 
better put than in his own words at the 
opening of the first house. 

" No patron of the Mills Hotel," he said, 
'' will receive more than he pays for, unless 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 91 

it be my hearty goodwill and good wishes. It 
is true that I have devoted thought, labor^ 
and capital to a very earnest effort to help 
him, but only by enabling him to help him- 
self. In doing the work on so large a scale, 
and in securing the utmost economies in 
purchases and in administration, I hope to 
give him a larger equivalent for his money 
than has hitherto been possible. He can, 
without scruple, permit me to offer him this 
advantage ; but he will think better of him- 
self, and will be a more self-reliant, manly 
man and a better citizen, if he knows that he 
is honestly paying for what he gets." 

Mr. Mills's faith that the business of 
housing the homeless crowds in decency and 
comfort could be made to pay just as well as 
that of housing families in model tenements 
has been justified. Besides providing a fund 
sufficient for deterioration and replacement, 
the two houses have made a clear three per 
cent, profit on the investment of $1,500,000 
which they represent. Beyond this, they 
have borne, and wiU bear increasingly, their 
own hand in settling with the saloon, which 
had no rival in the cheerlessness of the cheap 
lodging house or the boarding house back 



92 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

bedroomu Every philanthropic effort to 
fight it on that ground has drawn renewed 
courage and hope from Mr. Mills's work and 
success. 

While I am writing, subscriptions are be- 
ing made to the capital stock of a Woman's 
Hotel Company, that will endeavor to do 
for the self-supporting single women of our 
own city what Mr. Mills has done for the 
men. It is proposed to erect, at a cost of 
$800,000, a hotel capable of sheltering over 
500 guests, at a price coming within reach 
of women earning wages as clerks, stenogra- 
phers, nurses, etc. The number of women 
whose needs an establishment of the kind 
would meet is said to exceed 40,000. The 
Young Women's Christian Association alone 
receives every year requests enough for quar- 
ters to fill a score of such hotels, and can 
only refer the applicants to boarding houses. 
Experience in other cities shows that a wo- 
man's hotel or club can be managed and 
made profitable, and there seems to be little 
doubt that New York will be the next to 
furnish proof of it. It was the dream of 
A. T. Stewart, the merchant prince, to do 
this service for his city, just as he planned 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 93 

Garden City for a home colony for his 
clerks. It came out differently. The Long 
Island town became a cathedral city^ and 
the home of wealth and fashion ; his wo- 
man's boarding house a great public hotel^ 
far out of the reach of those he sought to 
benefit. It may be that the success of the 
banker's philanthropy will yet realize the 
dream of the merchant before the end of 
the century that saw his wealth, his great 
business, his very name, vanish as if they 
had never been, and even his bones denied, 
by ghoidish thieves, a rest in the grave. I 
like to think of it as a kind of justice to his 
memory, more eloquent than marble and 
brass in the empty crypt. Mills House No. 1 
stands upon the site of Mr. Stewart's old 
home, where he dreamed his barren dream 
of benevolence to his kind. 

Of all these movements the home is the 
keynote. That is the cheerful sign that 
shows light ahead. To the home it comes 
down in the end, — good government, bad 
government, and all the rest. As the homes 
of a community are, so is the community. 
New York has still the worst housing system 
in the world. Eight fifteenths of its people 



94 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

live in tenements, not counting the better 
class of flats, though legally they come 
under the definition. The blight of the 
twenty-five-foot lot remains, with the double- 
decker. But we can now destroy what is 
not fit to stand ; we have done it, and our 
republic yet survives. The slum landlord 
would have had us believe that it must 
perish with his rookeries. We knew that 
to build decently improved a neighborhood, 
made the tenants better and happier, and 
reduced the mortality. Model tenement 
house bonding is now proving daUy that 
such houses can be built safer and better 
every way for less money than the double- 
decker, by crossing the lot line. The dark 
hall is not a problem in the tenement built 
around a central court, for there is no com- 
mon hall. The plan of the double-decker is 
shown to be wasteful of space and wall and 
capital. The model tenement pays, does 
not deteriorate, and keeps its tenants. After 
the lapse of ten years, I was the other day 
in Mr. A. T. White's Riverside Buildings in 
Brooklyn, which are still the best I know of, 
and found them, if anything, better houses 
than the day they were built. The stone 



• I « 



• » - •. 

• •• 



« •« « 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 95 

steps of the stairways were worn : that was 
all the evidence of deterioration I saw. 
These, and Mr. White's other block of build- 
ings on Hicks Street, which was built more 
than twenty years ago, — occupied, aU of 
them, by distinctly poor tenants, — have 
paid their owner over five per cent, right 
along. Practically, every such enterprise has 
the same story to tell. Dr. Gould found 
that only six per cent, of all the great model 
housing operations had failed to pay. All 
the rest were successful. That was the show- 
ing of Europe. It is the same here. Only 
ike i^enty-five-foot lot is in the way in New 
York. 

It wiU continue to be in the way. A man 
who has one lot will build on it: it is his 
right. The state, which taxes his lot, has 
no right to confiscate it by forbidding him 
to make it yield him an income, on the plea 
that he might build something which would 
be a nuisance. But it can so order the 
building that it shall not be a nuisance: 
that is not only its right, but its duty. The 
best which can be made out of a twenty- 
five-foot lot is not good, but even that has 
not been made out of it yet. I have seen 



96 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

plans drawn by two young women architects 
in this city, the Misses Gannon and Hands, 
and approved by the Building Department, 
which let in an amount of light and air 
not dreamed of in the conventional type 
of double-decker, while providing detached 
stairs in a central court. It was not pre- 
tended that it was an ideal plan, — far from 
it ; but it indicated clearly the track to be 
followed in dealing with the twenty-five-f oot 
lot, seeing that we cannot get rid of it. 
The demand for light and air space must be 
sharpened and rigidly held to, and " discre- 
tion " to cut it down on any pretext must be 
denied, to the end of discouraging at least 
the building of double-deckers by the specu- 
lative landlord who has more than one lot, 
but prefers to build in the old way, in order 
that he may more quickly sell his houses, 
one by one. 

With much evidence to the contrary in 
the big blocks of tenements that are going 
up on every hand, I think still we are tend- 
ing in the right direction. I come oftener, 
nowadays, upon three tenements built on 
four lots, or two on three lots, than I used 
to. Indeed, there was a time when such a 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 97 

thing would have been considered wicked 
waste, or evidence of unsound mind in the 
builder. Houses are built now, as they were 
then, for profit. The business element must 
be there, or the business will fail. Philan- 
thropy and five pei^ cent, belong together 
in this field; but there is no more reason 
for allowing usurious interest to a man 
who makes a living by providing houses for 
the poor than for allowing it to a lender 
of money on security. In fact, there is less ; 
for the former draws his profits from a 
source with which the welfare of the com- 
monwealth is indissolubly bound up. The 
Tenement House Committee found that the 
double-deckers yield the landlord an average 
of ten per cent., attack the home, and are a 
peril to the community. Model tenements 
pay a safe five per cent., restore the home, 
and thereby strengthen the community. It 
comes down, then, as I said, to a simple 
question of the per cent, the builder will 
take. It should help his choice to know, as 
he cannot now help knowing, that the usu- 
rious profit is the price of good citizenship 
and human happiness, which suffer in the 
proportion in which the home is injured. 






96 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

The problem of rent should be solved by 
the same formula^ but not so readily. In 
the case of the builder the state can add 
force to persuasion, and so urge him along 
the path of righteousness. The only way 
to reach the rent collector would be for the 
municipality to enter the field as a compet- 
ing landlord. Doubtless relief could be 
afforded that way. The Tenement House 
Committee found that the slum landlord 
charged the highest rents, sometimes as high 
as twenty-five per cent. He made no re- 
pairs. Model tenement house rents are 
lower, if anything, than those of the double- 
decker, with more space and better accommo- 
dations. Such a competition would have to 
be on a very large scale, however, to avail, 
and I am glad that New York has shown 
no disposition to undertake it yet. I would 
rather we, as a community, learned first a 
little more of the art of governing ourselves 
without scandal. Present relief from the 
burden that taxes the worker one fourth of 
his earnings for a roof over his head must 
be sought in the movement toward the sub- 
urbs that will follow the bridging of our 
rivers, and real rapid transit. On the island 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 99 

rente wiU always remain high, on account 
of the great land values. But I have often 
thought that if the city may not own new 
tenements, it might with advantage manage 
the old to the extent of licensing them to 
contain so many tenants on the basis of the 
air space, and no more. The suggestion 
was made when the tenement house question 
first came up for discussion, thirty years ago, 
but it was rejected then. The same thing 
is now proposed for rooms and workshops, 
as the means of getting the best of the 
sweating nuisance. Why not Ucense the 
whole tenement, and with the money col- 
lected in the way of fees pay for the super- 
vision of them by night and day? The 
squad of sanitary policemen now comprises 
for the Greater City some ninety men. Forty- 
one thousand tenements in the Borough 
of Manhattan alone, at three dollars each 
for the license, would pay the salaries of the 
entire body, and leave a margin. Seeing 
that their services are going exclusively to 
the tenements, it would not seem to be an 
unfair charge upon the landlords. 

The home is the key to good citizenship. 
Unhappily for the great cities, there exists 



100 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

in them all a class that has lost the key or 
thrown it away. For this class, New York, 
until three years ago, had never made any 
provision. The police station lodging rooms, 
of which I have spoken, were not to be 
dignified by the term. These vile dens, in 
which the homeless of our great city were 
herded, without pretense of bed, of bath, of 
food, on rude planks, were the most per- 
nicious parody on municipal charity, I verily 
believe, that any civilized community had 
ever devised. To escape physical and moral 
contagion in these crowds seemed humanly 
impossible. Of the innocently homeless lad 
they made a tramp by the shortest cut. To 
the old tramp they were indeed ideal pro- 
vision, for they enabled him to spend for 
drink every cent he could beg or steal. With 
the stale beer dive, the free lunch counter, 
and the police lodging room at hand, his cup 
of happiness was full. There came an evil 
day, when the stale beer dive shut its doors 
and the free lunch disappeared for a season. 
The beer pump, which drained the kegs dry 
and robbed the stale beer collector of his 
ware, drove the dives out of business; the 
Kaines law forbade the free lunch. Just at 



. * • ♦^ t • f 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 101 

this time Theodore Roosevelt shut the police 
lodging rooms, and the tramp was literally 
left out in the cold, cursing reform and its 
fruits. It was the climax of a campaign a 
generation old, during which no one had 
ever been found to say a word in defense of 
these lodging rooms; yet nothing had availed 
to close them. 

The city took lodgers on an old barge in 
the East River, that winter, and kept a regis- 
ter of them. We learned something from 
that. Of nearly 10,000 lodgers, one half 
were under thirty years old and in good 
health, — fat, in fact. The doctors reported 
them ^^well nourished." Among 100 whom 
I watched taking their compulsory bath, one 
night, only two were skinny ; the others were 
stout, well-fed men, abundantly able to do 
a man's work. They all insisted that they 
were willing, too ; but the moment inquiries 
began with a view of setting such to work 
as really wanted it, and sending the rest to 
the island as vagrants, their number fell off 
most remarkably. From between 400 and 
500 who had crowded the barge and the pier 
sheds, the attendance fell on March 16, the 
day the investigation began, to 330, on the 



*% 



102 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

second day to 294^ and on the third day to 
171; by March 21 it had been cut down 
to 121. The problem of the honestly home- 
lesS; who were without means to pay for a 
bed even in a ten-cent lodging house^ and 
who had a claim upon the city by virtue of 
residence in it, had dwindled to surprisingly 
small proportions. Of 9386 lodgers, 3622 
were shown to have been here less than sixty 
days, and 968 more not a year. The old 
mistake, that there is always a given amount 
of absolutely homeless destitution in a city, 
and that it is to be measured by the number 
of those who apply for free lodging, h«. 
been reduced to a demonstration. The truth 
is that the opportunity furnished by the 
triple alliance of stale beer, free lunch, and 
free lodging at the police station was the 
open door to permanent and hopeless va- 
grancy. 

A city lodging house was established, with 
decent beds, baths, and breakfast, and a 
system of investigation of the lodger's claim 
that is yet to be developed to useful propor- 
tions. The Unk that is missing is a farm 
school, for the training of young vagrants 
to habits of industry and steady work, as 



THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 103 

the alternative of the workhouse. Efforts 
to forge this link have failed so far^ but in 
the good time that is coming, when we shall 
have learned the lesson that the unkindest 
thing that can be done to a young tramp is to 
let him go on tramping, and when magistrates 
shall blush to discharge him on the plea that 
" it is no crime to be poor in this country," 
they will succeed, and the tramp also we shall 
then have **druv into decency." When I 
look back now to the time, ten or fifteen 
years ago, when, night after night, with 
every police station filled, I found the old 
tenements in the ^^Bend" jammed with a 
reeking mass of human wrecks that huddled 
in hall and yard, and slept, crouching in 
shivering files, all the way up the stairs to 
the attic, it does seem as if we had come a 
good way, and as if all the turmoil and the 
bruises and the fighting had been worth 
while. 



r\ 



IV 



THE TENANT 



We have considered the problem of the 
tenement. Now about the tenant. How 
much of a problem is he ? And how are we 
to go about solving his problem ? 

The government " slum inquiry," of which 
I have spoken before, gave us some facts 
about him. In New York it found 62.58 
per cent, of the population of the slum to be 
foreign-born, whereas for the whole city the 
percentage of foreigners was only 43.23. 
While the proportion of illiteracy in all was 
only as 7.69 to 100, in the slum it was 46.65 
per cent. That, with nearly twice as many 
saloons to a s^iven number, there should be 

in the city at large need not be attributed to 
nationality, except indirectly in its possible 
responsibility for the saloons. I say "pos- 
sible " advisedly. Anybody, I should think, 
whose misfortune it is to live in the slum 



THE TENANT 105 

might be expected to find in the saloon a 
refuge. I shall not quarrel with the other 
view of it. I am merely stating a personal 
impression. The fact that concerns us here 
is the great proportion of the foreign-born. 
Though the inquiry covered only a small 
section of a tenement district^ the result may 
be accepted as typical. 

We shall not, then^ have to do with an 
American element in discussing this tenant, 
for even of the " natives " in the census, by 
far the largest share is made up of the chil- 
dren of the immigrant. Indeed, in New 
York only 4.77 per cent, of the slum popu- 
lation canvassed were shown to be of native 
parentage. The parents of 95.23 per cent, 
had come over the sea, to better themselves, 
it may be assumed. Let us see what they 
brought us, and what we have given them in 
return. 

The Italians were in the majority where 
this census taker went. They were from the 
south of Italy, avowedly the worst of the 
Italian immigration which in the eight years 
from 1891 to 1898 gave us more than half 
a million of King Humbert's subjects. The 
exact number, as registered by the Emigra- 



106 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

tion Bureau, was 502,592. In 1898, 58,613 
came over, 36,086 of them with New York 
as their destination. The official year ends 
with June. In the six months from July 1 
to December 31, the immigrants were sorted 
out upon a more intelligent plan than previ- 
ously. The process as appUed to the 30,470 
Italians who were landed during that term 
yielded this result: from northern Italy, 
4762; from southern Italy, 25,708. Of 
these latter a number came from Sicily, the 
island of the absentee landlord, where peas- 
ants die of hunger. I make no apology for 
quoting here the statement of an Italian 
officer, on duty in the island, to a staff cor- 
respondent of the ^^Tribuna" of Rome, a 
paper not to be suspected of disloyalty to 
United Italy. I take it from the " Evening 
Post : " — 

"In the month of July I stopped on a 
march by a threshing floor where they were 
measuring grain. When the shares had 
been divided, the one who had cultivated the 
land received a single tumolo (less than a 
half bushel). The peasant, leaning on his 
spade, looked at his share as if stunned. 
His wife and their five children were stand- 



THE TENANT 107 

ing by. From the painful toil of a year this 
was what was left to him with which to feed 
his family. The tears rolled silently down 
his cheeks." 

These things occasionally help one to un- 
derstand. Over against this picture there 
arises in my memory one from the Barge 
Office, where I had gone to see an Italian 
steamer come in. A family sat apart, 
ordered to wait by the inspecting officer ; in 
the group an old man, worn and wrinkled, 
who viewed the turmoil with the calmness of 
one having no share in it. The younger 
members formed a sort of bulwark around 
him. 

** Your father is too old," said the official. 

Two young women and a boy of sixteen 
rose to their feet at once. "Are not we 
young enough to work for him ? " they said. 
The boy showed his strong arms. 

It is charg^ed ag^ainst this Italian immi- 
grant that he is di^, and the charge is i^e. 
He Uves in the darkest of slums, and pays 
rent that ought to hire a decent flat. To 
wash, water is needed ; and we have a law 
which orders tenement landlords to put it on 
every floor, so that their tenants may have 



108 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

the chance. And it is not yet half a dozen 
years since one of the biggest tenement 
house landlords in the city, the wealthiest 
church corporation in the land, attacked the 
constitutionality of this statute rather than 
pay a couple of hundred dollars for put- 
ting water into two old buildings, as the 
Board of Health had ordered, and came near 
upsetting the whole structure of tenement 
house kw upon which our safety depeuds. 
He is ignorant, it is said, and that charge is 
also true. I doubt if one of the family in 
the Barge Office could read or write his own 
name. Yet would you fear especial danger 
to our institutions, to our citizenship, from 
these four? He lives cheaply, crowds, and 
underbids even the Jew in the sweatshop. 
I can myself testify to the truth of these 
statements. Only this spring I was the um- 
pire in a quarrel between the Jewish tailors 
and the factory inspector whom they ar- 
raigned before the Governor on charges of 
inefficiency. The burden of their grievance 
was that the Italians were underbidding them 
in their own market, which of course the 
factory inspector could not prevent. Yet, 
even so, the evidence is not that the Italian 



THE TENANT 109 

always gets the best of it. I came across 
a family once working on "knee-pants." 
" Twelve pants^ ten cents/' said the tailor, 
when there was work. " Ve work for dem 
sheenies," he explained. "Ven dey has 
work, ve gets some ; ven dey has n't, ve 
don't." He was an unusually gifted tailor as 
to English, but apparently not as to business 
capacity. In the Astor tenements, in Eliza- 
beth Street, where we found forty-three 
families living in rooms intended for sixteen, 
I saw women finishing "pants" at thirty 
cents a day. Some of the garments were of 
good grade, and some of poor ; some of them 
were soldiers' trousers, made for the govern- 
ment ; but whether they received five, seven, 
eight, or ten cents a pair, it came to thirty 
cents a day, except in a single instance, in 
which two women, sewing from five in the 
morning tiU eleven at night, were able, being 
practiced hands, to finish forty-five " pants " 
at three and a half cents a pair, and so made 
together over a dollar and a half. They were 
content, even happy. I suppose it seemed 
wealth to them, coming from a land where a 
Parisian investigator of repute found three 
lire (not quite sixty cents) jper month a girl's 
wages. 



110 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

I remember one of those flats^ poor and 
dingy, yet with signs of the instinctive grop- 
ing toward orderly arrangement which I 
have observed so many times, and take to be 
evidence that in better surroundings much 
might be made of these people. Clothes 
were hung to dry on a line strung the whole 
length of the room. Upon couches by the 
wall some men were snoring. They were 
the boarders. The '^ man " was out shovel- 
ing snow with the midnight shift. By a 
lamp with brown paper shade, over at the 
window, sat two women sewing. One had 
a baby on her lap. Two sweet little cherubs, 
nearly naked, slept on a pile of unfinished 
"pants," and smUed in their sleep. A girl 
of six ;r seven dozed in a chUd's rocker be- 
tween the two workers, with her head hang- 
ing down on one side; the mother propped 
it up with her elbow as she sewed. They 
were all there, and happy in being together 
even in such a place. On a corner shelf 
burned a night lamp before a print of the 
Mother of God, flanked by two green bottles, 
which, seen at a certain angle, made quite a 
festive show. 

Complaint is made that the Italian pro- 



THE TENANT 111 

motes child labor. His children work at 
home on "pants" and flowers at an hour 
when they ought to have been long in bed. 
Their sore eyes betray the little flower- 
makers when they come tardily to school. 
Doubtless there are such cases, and quite too 
many of them ; yet, in the very block which 
I have spoken of, the investigation con- 
ducted for the Tenement House Committee 
by the University Department of Sociology 
of Columbia College, under Professor Frank- 
lin H. Giddings, discovered of 196 children 
of school age only 23 at work or at home, 
and in the next block only 27 out of 215. 
That was the showing of the foreign popu- 
lation all the way through. Of 225 Russian 
Jewish children only 15 were missing from 
school, and of 354 little Bohemians only 21. 
The overcrowding of the schools and their 
long waiting lists occasionally furnished the 
explanation why they were not there. Pro- 
fessor Giddings reported, after considering 
all the evidence: ^^The foreign-born popu- 
lation of the city is not, to any great extent, 
forcing children of legal school age into 
money-earning occupations. On the con- 
trary, this population shows a strong desire 



112 A TEN YEAKS' WAR 

to have its children acquire the common rudi- 
ments of education. If the city does not 
provide Uberally and wisely for the satisfac- 
tion of this desire, the blame for the civic 
and moral dangers that will threaten our 
community, because of ignorance, vice, and 
poverty, must rest on the whole public, not 
on our foreign-born residents." It is satis- 
factory to know that the warning has been 
heeded, and that soon there will be schools 
enough to hold all the children who come. 
Now, since September 1, 1899, the new fac- 
tory law reaches also the Italian flowermaker 
in his home, and that source of waste will be 
stopped. 

He is clannish, this Italian; he gambles 
and uses a knife, though rarely on anybody 
not of his own people; he ^Hakes what he 
can get," wherever anything is free, as who 
would not, coming to the feast like a starved 
wolf? There was nothing free where he 
came from. Even the salt was taxed past 
a poor man's getting any of it. Lastly, he 
buys fraudulent naturalization papers, and 
uses them. I shall plead guilty for him to 
every one of these counts. They are all 
proven. Gambling is his besetting sin. He 



THE TENANT 113 

is sober, industrious, frugal, enduring be- 
yond belief, but he will gamble on Sunday 
and quarrel over his cards, and when he 
sticks his partner in the heat of the quarrel, 
the partner is not apt to tell. He prefers 
to bide his time. Yet there has lately been 
evidence once or twice in the surrender of 
an assassin by his countrymen that the old 
vendetta is being shelved, and a new idea of 
law and justice is breaking through. As 
to the last charge : our Italian is not dull. 
With his intense admiration for the land 
where a dollar a day waits upon the man 
with a shovel, he can see no reason why he 
should not accept the whole "American 
plan " with ready enthusiasm. It is a good 
plan. To him it sums itself up in the state- 
ment: a dollar a day for the shovel; two 
dollars for the shovel with a citizen behind 
it. And he takes the papers and the two 
dollars. 

He came here for a chance to live. Of 
politics, social ethics, he knows nothing. 
Government in his old home existed only 
for his oppression. Why should he not a<. 
tach himself with his whole loyal soul to the 
plan of government in his new home that 



114 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

offers to boost him into the place of his 
wildest ambition, a " job on the streets," — 
that is, in the Street-Cleaning Department, 
— and asks no other return than that he shall 
vote as directed ? Vote ! Not only he, but 
his cousins and brothers and uncles will vote as 
they are told, to get Pietro the job he covets. 
If it pleases the other man, what is it to him 
for whom he votes? He is after the job. 
Here, ready-made to the hand of the poli- 
tician, is such material as he never saw be- 
fore. For Pietro's loyalty is great. As a 
police detective, one of his own people, once 
put it to me : " He got a kind of an idea, 
or an old rule: an eye for an eye; do to 
another as you'd be done by; if he don't 
squeal on you, you stick by him, no matter 
what the consequences." This " kind of an 
idea" is all he has to draw upon for an 
answer to the question if the thing is right. 
But the question does not arise. Why 
should it ? Was he not told by the agita- 
tors whom the police jailed at home that in 
a republic all men are made happy by means 
of the vote ? And is there not proof of it ? 
It has made him happy, has it not? And 
the man who bought his vote seems to like 
it. Well then ? 



THE TENANT 116 

Very early Pietro discovered that it was 
every man for himself^ in the chase of the 
happiness which this powerful vote had in 
keeping. He was robbed by the padrone — 
that is, the boss — when he came over, 
fleeced on his steamship fare, made to pay 
for getting a job, and charged three prices 
for board and lodging and extras while 
working in the ra^oad gang. The boss 
had a monopoly, and Pietro was told that 
it was maintained by his " divvying " with 
some railroad ofi&cial. Rumor said, a very 
high-up official, and that the railroad was in 
politics in the city; that is to say, dealt in 
votes. When the job gave out, the boss 
packed him into the tenement he had bought 
with his profits on the contract ; and if Pie- 
tro had a family, told him to take in lodgers 
and crowd his flat, as the Elizabeth Street 
tenements were crowded, so as to make out 
the rent, and to never mind the law. The 
padrone was a politician, and had a pull. 
He was bigger than the law, and it was the 
votes he traded in that did it all. Now it 
was Pietro's turn. With his vote he could 
buy what to him seemed wealth. In the 
muddle of ideas, that was the one which 



116 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

stood out. When citizen papers were of- 
fered him for $12.50, he bought them 
quickly, and got his job on the street. 

It was the custom of the country. If 
there was any doubt about it, the proof was 
furnished when Pietro was arrested through 
the envy and plotting of the opposition boss 
last fall. Distinguished counsel, employed 
by the machine, pleaded his case in court. 
Pietro felt himself to be quite a personage, 
and he was told that he was safe from harm, 
though a good deal of dust might be kicked 
up; because, when it came down to that, 
both the bosses were doing the same kind of 
business. I quote from the report of the 
State Superintendent of Elections of Jan- 
uary, 1899 : " In nearly every case of illegal 
registration, the defendant was represented 
by eminent counsel who were identified with 
the Democratic organization, among them 
being three assistants to the Corporation 
counsel. My deputies arrested Rosario Cale- 
cione and Giuseppe Marrone, both of whom 
appeared to vote at the fifth election district 
of the Sixth Assembly District; Marrone 
being the Democratic captain of the district, 
and, it was charged, himself engaged in the 



THE TENANT 117 

business of securing fraudulent naturaliza- 
tion papers. In both of these cases Farriello 
had procured the naturalization papers for 
the men for a consideration. They were 
subsequently indicted. Marrone and Cale- 
cione were bailed by the Democratic leader 
of the Sixth Assembly District." 

The business^ says the State Superintend- 
ent, is carried on " to an enormous extent." 
It appears, then, that Fietro has already 
" got on to " the American plan as the slum 
presented it to him, and has in good earnest 
become a problem. I guessed as much from 
the statement of a Tammany politician to 
me, a year ago, that every Italian voter in 
his district got his "old two" on election 
day. He ought to know, for he held the 
purse. Suppose, now, we speak our minds 
as frankly, for once, and put the blame 
where it belongs. Will it be on Pietro? 
And upon this showing, who ought to be 
excluded, when it comes to that ? 

The slum census taker did not cross the 
Bowery. Had he done so, he would have 
come upon the refugee Jew, the other eco- 
nomic marplot of whom complaint is made 
with reason. If his Nemesis has overtaken 



118 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

him in the ItaHan^ certainly he challenged 
that fate. He did cut wages by his coming. 
He was starving, and he came in shoals. 
In fourteen years more than 400,000 Jew- 
ish immigrants have landed in New York.^ 
They had to have work and food, and they 
got both as they could. In the strife they 
developed qualities that were anything but 
pleasing. They herded like cattle. They 
had been so herded by Christian rulers, a 
despised and persecuted race, through the 
centuries. Their very coming was to escape 
from their last inhuman captivity in a Chris- 
tian state. They lied, they were greedy, they 
were charged with bad faith. They brought 
nothing, — neither money nor artisan skill, 
— nothing but their consuming energy, to 
our land, and their one gift was their great- 
est offense. One might have pointed out 
that they had been trained to lie, for their 
safety ; had been forbidden to work at trades, 
to own land; had been taught for a thou- 
sand years, with the scourge and the stake, 
that only gold could buy them freedom from 

^ According to the register of the United Hebrew Chari- 
ties, between October 1, 1884, and March 1, 1899, the nun^ 
ber was 402,181. 



THE TENANT 119 

torture. But what was the use? The charges 
were true. The Jew was — he still is — a 
problem of our slum. 

And yet, if ever there was material for 
citizenship, this Jew is such material. Alone 
of all our immigrants he comes to us with- 
out a past. He has no country to renounce, 
no ties to forget. Within him there burns 
a passionate longing for a home to call his, a 
country which will own him, that waits only 
for the spark of such another love to spring 
into flame which nothing can quench. Wait- 
ing for it, all his energies are turned into 
his business. He is not always choice in 
method ; he often offends. But he succeeds. 
He is the yeast of any slum, if given time. 
If it will not let him go, it must rise with 
him. The charity managers in London said 
it, when we looked through their slums some 
years ago : " The Jews have renovated White- 
chapel." I, for one, am a firm believer in 
this Jew, and in his boy. Ignorant they are, 
but with a thirst for knowledge that sur- 
mounts any barrier. The boy takes all the 
prizes in the school. His comrades sneer 
that he will not fight. Neither will he when 
there is nothing to be gamed by it. But I 



120 A TEN YEAKS' WAR 

believe that^ should the time come when the 
country needs fighting men, the son of the 
despised immigrant Jew will resurrect on 
American soil, the first that bade him wel- 
come, the old Maccabee type, and set an 
example for all the rest of us to follow. 

For fifteen years he has been in the pub- 
lic eye as the vehicle and promoter of sweat- 
ing, and much severe condemnation has been 
visited upon him with good cause. He had 
to do something, and he took to the clothes- 
maker's trade as that which was most quickly 
learned. The increasing crowds, the tene- 
ment, and his grinding poverty made the 
son, wherein the evil thing grew rank. Yet 
the real sweater is the manufacturer, not the 
workman. It is just a questibn of expense 
to the manufacturer. By letting out his 
work on contract, he can save the expense 
of running his factory and delay longer 
making his choice of styles. The Jew is 
the victim of the mischief quite as much 
as he has helped it on. Back of the manu- 
facturer there is still another sweater, — the 
public. Only by its sufferance of the bar- 
gain counter and of sweatshop-made goods 
has the nuisance existed as long as it has. 



THE TENANT 121 

I am glad to believe that its time is passing 
away. The law has driven the sweatshops 
out of the tenements, and so deprived them 
of one of their chief props : there was no 
rent at all to pay there. Child labor, which 
only four years ago the Reinhard Committee 
characterized as " one of the most extensive 
evils now existing in the city of New York, 
a constant and grave menace to the welfare 
of its people," has been practic% banished 
from the tailoring trade. What organiza- 
tion among the workers had failed to effect 
is apparently going to be accomplished by 
direct pressure of an outraged public opin- 
ion. Already manufacturers are returning 
to their own factories, and making capital 
of the fact among their customers. The 
new law, which greatly extends the factory 
inspector's power over sweatshops, is an ex- 
pression of this enUghtened sentiment. It 
will put New York a long stride ahead, and 
quite up to Massachusetts. The inspector's 
tag has proved, where the law was violated, 
an effective weapon. It suspends all opera- 
tion of the shop and removal of the goods 
until the orders of the inspector have been 
obeyed. But the tag which shall finally put 



122 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

an end to sweating, and restore decent con- 
ditions, is not the factory inspector's, I am 
persuaded, but a trades union label, which 
shall deserve pubUc confidence and receive 
it. We have much to learn yet, all of us. 
I think I can see the end of this trouble, 
however, when the Italian's triumph in the 
sweatshop shall have proved but a barren 
victory, to his own gain. 

In all I have said so far, in these papers, 
I have not gone beyond the limits of the 
old city, — of Manhattan Island, in fact. I 
want now to glance for a moment at the 
several attempts made at colonizing refugee 
Jews in this part of the coimtry. Browns- 
ville was one of the earliest. Its projector 
was a manufacturer, and its motive profit. 
The result was the familiar one, — as nasty 
a little slum as ever the East Side had to 
show. We have it on our hands now in the 
Greater City, — it came in with Brooklyn, 
— and it is not a gain. Down in southern 
New Jersey several colonies were started, 
likewise by speculators, in the persecution 
of the early eighties, and these also failed. 
The soil was sandy and poor, and, thrown 
upon their own resources in a strange and 



THE TENANT 123 

unfriendly neighborhood, with unfamiliar 
and unremunerative toil, the colonists grew 
discouraged and gave up in despair. The 
colonies were approaching final collapse, 
when the managers of the Baron de Hirsch 
Fund in New York, who had started and 
maintained a successful colony at Woodbine, 
in the same neighborhood, took them under 
the arms and inaugurated a new plan. They 
persuaded several large clothing contractors 
in this city to move their plants down to 
the villages, where they would be assured 
of steady hands, not so easily affected by 
strikes. For strikes in sweatshops are often 
enough the alternative of starvation. Upon 
the land there would be no starvation. The 
managers of the Fund built factories, bought 
the old mortgages on the farms, and put up 
houses for the families which the contractors 
brought down with them. This effort at 
transplanting the crowd from the Ghetto to 
the soil has now been going on for a year. 
At latest account, eight contractors and two 
hundred and fifty families had been moved 
out. The colonies had taken on a new lease 
of life and apparent prosperity. While it is 
yet too early to pass sober judgment, there 



124 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

seems to be good ground for hoping that a 
real way out has been found that shall restore 
the Jew, at least in a measure, to the soil 
from which he was barred so long. The ex- 
periment is of exceeding interest. The hopes 
of its projectors that a purely farming com- 
munity might be established have not been 
realized. Perhaps it was too much to expect. 
By bringing to the farmers their missing 
market, and work to the surplus population, 
the mixed settlement plan bids fair to prove 
a step in the desired direction. 

Some 18,500 acres are now held by Jew- 
ish colonists in New Jersey. In the New 
England States, in the last eight years, 600 
abandoned farms have been occupied and are 
cultivated by refugees from Russia. As a 
dairy farmer and a poultry raiser, the Jew 
has more of an immediate commercial grip on 
the situation and works with more courage. 
At Woodbine, sixty-five boys and girls are 
being trained in an agricultural school that 
has won the whole settlement the friendly 
regard of the neighborhood. Of its pupils, 
eleven came out of tailor shops, and ten had 
been office boys, messengers, or newsboys. 
To these, and to the trade schools now sue- 



THE TENANT 126 

cessf ully operated by the de Hirsch Fund, 
we are to look in the next generation for 
the answer to the old taunt that the Jew is 
a trader, and not fit to be either farmer or 
craftsman, and for the solution of the pro- 
blem which he now presents in the slum. 

I have spoken at length of the Jew and 
the Italian, because they are our present pro- 
blem. Yesterday it was the Irishman and 
the Bohemian. To-morrow it may be the 
Greek, who already undersells the Italian 
from his pushcart in the Fourth Ward, and 
the Syrian, who can give Greek, Italian, 
and Jew points at a trade. From Dalmatia 
a new immigration has begun to come, and 
there are signs of its working further east in 
the Balkan states, where there is no telling 
what is in store for us. How to absorb 
them all safely is the question. Doubtless 
the Irishman, having absorbed us poUticaUy, 
would be glad to free us from all concern on 
that score by doing a like favor for them. 
But we should not get the best of the slum 
that way; it would get the best of us, in- 
stead. Would I shut out the newcomers? 
Sometimes, looking at it from the point of 
view of the Barge Office and the sweatshop^ 



126 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

I think I would. Then there comes up 
the recollection of a picture of the city of 
Prague that hangs in a Bohemian friend's 
parlor, here in New York. I stood looking 
at it one day, and noticed in the foreground 
cannon that pointed in over the city. I 
spoke of it, unthinking, and said to my 
host that they should be trained, if against 
an enemy, the other way. The man's eye 
flashed fire. " Ha ! " he cried, " here, yes ! " 
When I think of that, I do not want to shut 
the door. 

Again, there occurs to me an experience 
the police had last summer in Mulberry 
Street. They were looking for a murderer, 
and came upon a nest of Italian thugs who 
lived by blackmailing their countrymen. 
They were curious about them, and sent 
their names to Naples with a request for 
information. There came back such a re- 
cord as none of the detectives had ever 
seen or heard of before. All of them were 
notorious criminals, who had been charged 
with every conceivable crime, from burglary 
to kidnapping and "maiming," and some 
not to be conceived of by the American 
mind. Five of them together had been sixty- 



THE TENANT 127 

three times in jail^ and one no less than 
twenty-one times. Yet, though they were 
all ^^ under special surveillance," they had 
come here without let or hindrance within a 
year. When I recall that, I want to shut 
the door quick. I sent the exhibit to Wash- 
ington at the time. But then, again, when 
I think of Mrs. Michelangelo in her poor 
mourning for one child run over and killed, 
wipmg her tears away and going bravely to 
work to keep the home together for the other 
five until the oldest shall be old enough to 
take her father's place ; and when, as now, 
there strays into my hand the letter from 
my good friend, the " woman doctor " in the 
slum, when her father had died, in which 
she wrote : " The little scamps of the street 
have been positively pathetic; they have 
made such shy, boyish attempts at friendH- 
ness. One little chap offered to let me hold 
his top while it was spinning, in token of 
affection," — when I read that, I have not 
the heart to shut anybody out. 

Except, of course, the unfit, the criminal 
and the pauper^ cast off by their own, and 
the man brought over here merely to put 
money iQto the pockets of the steamship 



128 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

agent; the padrone, and the mine owner. 
We have laws to bar these out. Suppose we 
begin by being honest with ourselves and the 
immigrant, and enforcing our own laws. In 
spite of a healthy effort at the port of New 
York, — I can only speak for that, — under 
the present administration, that has not yet 
been done. When the door has been shut 
and locked against the man who left his 
country for his country's good, whether by 
its " assistance " or not, and when trafiBcking 
in the immigrant for private profit has been 
stopped, then, perhaps, we shall be better 
able to decide what degree of ignorance in 
him constitutes unfitness for citizenship and 
cause for shutting him out. Perchance then, 
also, we shall hear less of the cant about his 
being a peril to the republic. Doubtless 
ignorance is a peril, but the selfishness that 
trades upon ignorance is a much greater. 
He came to us without a country, ready to 
adopt such a standard of patriotism as he 
found, at its face value, and we gave him 
the rear tenement and slum politics. If he 
accepted the standard, whose fault was it? 
His being in such a hurry to vote that he 
could not wait till the law made him a citizen 



THE TENANT 129 

was no worse, to my mind, than the treach- 
ery of the " upper class " native, who refuses 
to go to the polls for fear he may rub up 
against him there. This last let us settle 
with first, and see what remains of our pro- 
blem. We can approach it honestly, then, 
at all events. 

When the country was in the throes of 
the silver campaign, the newspapers told the 
story of an old laborer who went to the sub- 
treasury and demanded to see the "boss." 
He undid the strings of an old leathern 
purse with fumbling fingers, and counted 
out more than two hundred dollars in gold 
eagles, the hoard of a lifetime of toil and 
seU-denial. They were for the government, 
he said. He had not the head to understand 
all the talk that was going, but he gathered 
from what he heard that the government was 
in trouble, and that somehow it was about 
not having gold enough. So he had brought 
what he had. He owed it all to the country, 
and now that she needed it he had come to 
give it back. The man was an Irishman. 
Very likely he was enrolled in Tammany and 
voted her ticket. I remember a tenement 
at the bottom of a back alley over on the 



130 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

East Side, where I once went visiting with 
the pastor of a mission chapel. Up in the 
attic there was a family of father and daugh- 
ter in two rooms that had been made out of 
one by dividing ofE the deep dormer window. 
It was midwinter, and they had no fire. He 
was a peddler, but the snow had stalled his 
pushcart and robbed them of their only other 
source of income, a lodger who hired cot 
room in the attic for a few cents a night. 
The daughter was not able to work. But 
she said, cheerfully, that they were " getting 
along." When it came out that she had 
not tasted soUd food for many days, was 
starving, in fact, - indeed, she ^ed 4hin a 
year, of the slow starvation of the tenements 
that parades in the mortality returns under 
a variety of scientific names which all mean 
the same thing, — she met her pastor's gentle 
chiding with the excuse, " Oh, your church 
has many poorer than I. I don't want to 
take your money." 

These were Germans, ordinarily held to be 
close-fisted; but I found that in their dire 
distress they had taken in a poor old man 
who was past working, and had kept him all 
winter, sharing with him what they had. He 



THE TENANT 131 

was none of theirs ; they hardly even knew 
him^ as it appeared. It was enough that he 
was "poorer than they," and lonely and 
hungry and cold. 

It was over here that the children of Dr. 
Elsing's Sunday school gave out of the depth 
of their poverty fifty-four doUars in pennies 
to be hung on the Christmas tree as their 
offering to the persecuted Armenians. One 
of their teachers told me of a Bohemian 
family that let the holiday dinner she brought 
them stand and wait, while they sent out to 
bid to the feast four little ragamuffins of 
the neighborhood who else would have gone 
hungry. I remember well a teacher in one 
of the Children's Aid Society's schools, her- 
self a tenement child, who, with breaking 
heart, but brave face, played and sang the 
children's Christmas carols with them rather 
than spoil their pleasure, while her only 
sister lay dying at home. 

I might keep on and fill many pages 
with instances of that kind, which simply go 
to prove that our poor human nature is at 
least as robust on Avenue A as up on Fifth 
Avenue, if it has half a chance, and often 
enough to restore one's faith in it, with no 



132 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

chance at all ; and I might set over against it 
the product of sordid and mean environment 
which one has never far to seek. Good and 
evil go together in the tenements as in the 
fine houses^ and the evil sticks out sometimes 
merely because it lies nearer the surface. The 
point is that the good does outweigh the bad^ 
and that the virtues that turn the balance 
are after all those that make for good citizen- 
ship anywhere, while the faults are oftenest 
the accidents of ignorance and lack of train- 
ing, which it is the business of society to 
correct. I recall my discouragement when 
I looked over the examination papers of a 
batch of candidates for police appointment, 
— young men largely the product of our 
public schools in this city and elsewhere, — 
and read in them that five of the original 
New England States were " England, Ireland, 
Scotland, Belfast, and Cork ; " that the Fire 
Department ruled New York in the absence 
of the Mayor, — I have sometimes wished 
it did, and that he would stay away awhile ; 
and that Lincoln was itiurdered by Balling- 
ton Booth. But we shall agree, no doubt, 
that the indictment of these papers was not 
of the men who wrote them, but of the school 



THE TENANT 133 

that stuffed its pupils with useless trash, and 
did not teach them to think. Neither have 
I forgotten that it was one of these very men 
who, having failed, and afterward got a job 
as a brids^e policeman, on his first pay day 
W ,4h from mI po,, half Wa L 
he was, to the settlement worker who had 
befriended him and his sick father, and 
gave him five dollars for "some one who 
was poorer than they." Poorer than they ! 
What worker among the poor has not heard 
it ? It is the charity of the tenement that 
covers a multitude of sins. There were 
thirteen in this policeman's family, and his 
wages were the biggest item of income in the 
house. 

Jealousy, envy, and meanness wear no 
fine clothes and masquerade under no smooth 
speeches in the slums. Often enough it is 
the very nakedness of the virtues that makes 
us stumble in our judgment. I have in 
mind the "difi&cult case" that confronted 
some philanthropic friends of mine in a rear 
tenement on Twelfth Street, in the person of 
an aged widow, quite seventy I should think, 
who worked uncomplainingly for a sweater 
aU day and far into the night, pinching and 



134 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

saving and stinting herself ^ with black bread 
and chicory cofEee as her only fare, in order 
that she might carry her pitiful earnings 
to her big, lazy lout of a son in Brooklyn, 
He never worked. My friends' difficulty 
was a very real one, for absolutely every 
attempt to relieve the widow was wrecked 
upon her mother heart. It all went over the 
river. Yet one would not have had her dif- 
ferent. 

Sometimes it is only the unfamiliar setting 
that shocks. When an East Side midnight 
burglar, discovered and pursued, killed a ten- 
ant who blocked his way of escape, a few 
weeks ago, his « gbl " gave him up to the 
police. But it was not because he had taken 
human life. " He was good to me," she ex- 
plained to the captain whom she told where 
to find him, '' but since he robbed the church 
I had no use for him." He had stolen, it 
seems, the communion service in a Staten 
Island church. The thoughtless laughed. 
But in her ignorant way she wa« only trying 
to apply the standards of morality as they 
had been taught her. Stunted, bemuddled, 
as they were, I think I should prefer to take 
my chances with her rather than with the 




BONE ALE.EY 






<• I- 

c • 



THE TENANT 135 

woman of wealth and luxury who, some 
years ago, gave a Christmas party to her 
lap-dog, as on the whole the sounder of the 
two, and by far the more hopeful. 

All of which is merely saying that the 
country is all right, and the people are to be 
trusted with the old faith in spite of the 
slum. And it is true, if we remember to put 
it that way, — in spite of the slum. There 
is nothing in the slum to warrant that faith 
save human nature as yet uncorrupted. How 
long it is to remain so is altogether a ques- 
tion of the sacrifices we are willing to make 
in our fight with the slum. As yet, we are 
told by the officials having to do with the 
enforcement of the health ordinances, which 
come closer to the life of the individual than 
any other kind, that the poor in the tene- 
ments are '' more amenable to the law than 
the better class." It is of the first impor- 
tance, then, that we should have laws deserv- 
ing of their respect, and that these laws 
should be enforced, lest they conclude that 
the whole thing is a sham. Respect for law 
is a very powerful bar against the sliun. 
But what, for instance, must the poor Jew 
understand, who is permitted to buy a live 



136 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

hen at the market^ yet neither to kill nor 
keep it in his tenement^ and who on his 
feast day finds a whole squad of poHcemen 
detailed to follow him around and see that 
he does not do any of the things with his 
fowl for which he must have bought it ? Or 
the day laborer, who drinks his beer in a 
" Raines law hotel/' where brick sandwiches, 
consisting of two pieces of bread with a 
brick between, are set out on the counter, in 
derision of the state law which forbids the 
serving of drinks without "meals"? (The 
Stanton Street saloon keeper who did that 
was solemnly acquitted by a jury.) Or the 
boy, who may buy fireworks on the Fourth 
of July, but not set them ofE? These are 
only ridiculous instances of an abuse that 
pervades our community life to an extent 
that constitutes one of the gravest perils. 
Insincerity of that kind is not lost on our 
fellow citizen by adoption, who is only anx- 
ious to fall in with the ways of the country ; 
and especially is it not lost on his boy. 

We shall see how it affects him. He is 
the one for whom we are waging the battle 
with the slum. He is the to-morrow that sits 
to-day drinking in the lesson of the prosper- 



THE TENANT 137 

ity of the big boss who declared with pride 
upon the witness stand that he rules New 
York, that judges pay him tribute, and that 
only when he says so a thing " goes ; " and 
that it is all for what he can get out of it, 
" just the same as everybody else." He sees 
corporations to-day pay blackmail and rob 
the people in return, quite according to the 
schedule of Hester Street, Only there it is 
the police who charge the peddler twenty 
cents, while here it is the politicians taking 
toll of the franchises, twenty per cent. Wall 
Street is not ordinarily reckoned in the slum, 
because of certain physical advantages ; but, 
upon the evidence of the day, I think we 
shall have to conclude that the advantage 
ends there. The boy who is learning such 
lessons, — how is it with him ? 

The president of the Society for the Pre- 
vention of Cruelty to Children says that 
children's crime is increasing, and he ought 
to know. The managers of the Children's 
Aid Society, after forty-six years of wres- 
tling with the slum for the boy, in which 
they have lately seemed to get the upper 
hand, say in this year's report that on the 
East Side children are growing up in certain 



138 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

districts "entirely neglected," and that the 
number of such children " increases beyond 
the power of philanthropic and religious 
bodies to cope properly with their needs." 
In the Tompkins Square Lodging House the 
evening classes are thinning out, and the 
keeper wails : " Those with whom we have 
dealt of late have not been inclined to accept 
this privilege ; how to make night school at- 
tractive to shiftless, indifferent street boys is 
a difficult problem to solve." 

Perhaps it is only that he has lost the key. 
Across the square, the Boys' Club of St. 
Mark's Place, that began with a handful, 
counts five thousand members to-day, and is 
seeking a place to build a house of its own. 
The school census man announces that no 
boy in that old stronghold of the "bread 
or blood " brigade need henceforth loiter in 
the street because there is not room in the 
public school, and the brigade has disbanded 
for want of recruits. The shop is being shut 
against the boy, and the bars let down at the 
playground. But from Tompkins Square, 
nevertheless, came Jacob Beresheim, whose 
story I shall tell you presently. 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 

Jacob Beresheim was fifteen when he 
was charged with murder. It is now more 
than three years ago^ but the touch of his 
hand is cold upon mine^ with mortal fear, 
as I write. Every few minutes, during our 
long talk on the night of his arrest and con- 
fession, he would spring to his feet, and, 
clutching my arm as a drowning man catches 
at a rope, demand with shaking voice, " Will 
they give me the chair?" The assurance 
that boys were not executed quieted him 
only for the moment. Then the dread and 
the horror were upon him again. 

Of his crime the less said the better. It 
was tiie climax of a career of depravity 
that differed from other such chiefly in the 
opportunities afforded by an environment 
which led up to and helped shape it. My 
business is with that environment. The 
man is dead, the boy in jail. But unless I 



140 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

am to be my brother's jail keeper, merely, 
the iron bars do not square the account of 
Jacob with society. Society exists for the 
purpose of securing justice to its members, 
appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. 
When it fails in this, the item is carried on 
the ledger with interest and compound inter- 
est toward a day of reckoning that comes 
surely with the paymaster. We have heard 
the chink of his coin on the counter, these 
days, in the unblushing revelations before 
the Mazet Committee of degraded citizen- 
ship, of the murder of the civic conscience, 
and in the applause that hailed them. And 
we have begun to understand that these are 
the interest on Jacob's account, older, much 
older than himseU. He is just an item car- 
ried on the ledger. But with that know- 
ledge the account is at last in a way of get- 
ting squared. Let us see how it stands. 

We shall take Jacob as a type of the 
street boy on the East Side, where he be- 
longed. What does not apply to him in the 
review applies to his class. But there was 
very little of it indeed that he missed or 
that missed him. 

He was born in a tenement in that section 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 141 

where the Tenement House Committee 
found 324,000 persons living out of sight 
and reach of a green spot of any kind, and 
where sometimes the buildings, front, mid- 
dle, and rear, took up ninety-three per cent, 
of all the space on the block. Such a home 
as he had was there, and of the things that 
belonged to it he was the heir. The sun- 
light was not among them. It "never en- 
tered " there. Darkness and discouragement 
did, and dirt. Later on, when he took to 
the dirt as his natural weapon in his bat- 
tles with society, it was said of him that it 
was the only friend that stuck to him, and 
it was true. Very early the tenement gave 
him up to the street. The thing he took 
with him as the one legacy of home was the 
instinct for the crowd, which meant that the 
tenement had wrought its worst mischief 
upon him: it had smothered that in him 
around which character is built. The more 
readily did he fall in with the street and its 
ways. Character implies depth, a soil, and 
growth. The street is all surface : nothing 
grows there ; it hides only a sewer. 

It taught him gambling as its first lesson, 
and stealing as the next. The two are 



142 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

never far apart. From shooting craps be- 
hind the "cop's" back to filching from the 
grocer's stock or plundering a defenseless 
peddler is only a step. There is in both the 
spice of law-breaking that appeals to the 
shallow ambition of the street as heroic. 
Occasionally the raids have a comic tinge. 
A German grocer wandered into police head- 
quarters the other day, with an appeal for 
protection against theboy.. 

" Vat means dot ^ cheese it ' ? " he asked^ 
rubbing his bald head in helpless bewilder- 
ment. "Efery dime dey says 'cheese it/ 
somedings vas gone." 

To the lawlessness of the street the home 
opposes no obstacle, as we have seen. Until 
very recently the school did not. It might 
have more to offer even now. There are, at 
least, schools where there were none then, 
and so much is gained ; also, they are get- 
ting better, but too many of them, in my 
unprofessional judgment, need yet to be 
made over, until they are fit to turn out 
whole, sound boys, instead of queer mani- 
kins stuffed with information for which they 
have no use, and which is none of their 
business anyhow. It seemed to me some- 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 143 

times, when watching the process of cram- 
ming the school course with the sum of 
human knowledge and conceit, as if it all 
meant that we distrusted nature's way of 
growing a man from a boy, and had set out 
to show her a shorter cut. A common re- 
sult was the kind of mental bef ogment that 
had Abraham Lincoln murdered by Balling- 
ton Booth, and a superficiality, a hopeless 
slurring of tasks, that hitched perfectly with 
the spirit of the street, and left nothing to 
be explained in the verdict of the reforma- 
tory, " No moral sense." There was no 
moral sense to be got out of the thing, for 
there was little sense of any kind in it. 
The boy was not given a chance to be 
honest with himself by thinking a thing 
through ; he came naturally to accept as his 
mental horizon the headlines in his penny 
paper and the literature of the Dare-Devil- 
Dan - the - Death - Dealing - Monster - of - Dakota 
order, which comprise the ordinary aesthetic 
equipment of the slum. The mystery of his 
further development into the tough need not 
perplex anybody. 

But Jacob Beresheim had not even the 
benefit of such schooling as there was to be 



144 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

had. He did not go to school, and nobody 
cared. There was indeed a law directing 
that every child should go, and a corps of 
truant officers to catch him if he did not; 
but the law had been a dead letter for a 
quarter of a century. There was no census 
to tell what children ought to be in school, 
and no place but a jail to put those in who 
shirked. Jacob was allowed to drift. From 
the time he was twelve till he was fifteen, he 
told me, he might have gone to school three 
weeks, — no more. 

Church and Sunday school missed him. 
I was going to say that they passed by on 
the other side, remembering the migration 
of the churches uptown, as the wealthy 
moved out of, and the poor into, the region 
south of Fourteenth Street. But that would 
hardly be fair. They moved after their 
congregations; but they left nothing be- 
hind. In the twenty years that followed 
the war, while enough to people a large city 
moved in downtown, the number of churches 
there was reduced from 141 to 127. Four- 
teen Protestant churches moved out. Only 
two Eoman Catholic churches and a syna- 
gogue moved in. I am not aware that there 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 146 

has been any large increase of churches in 
the district since, but we have seen that the 
crowding has not slackened pace. Jacob 
had no trouble in escaping the Sunday 
school as he had escaped the public school. 
His tribe will have none until the respon- 
sibility incurred in the severance of church 
and state sits less lightly on a Christian 
community, and the church, from a mob, 
shall have become an army, with von Molt- 
ke's plan of campaign, " March apart, fight 
together." The Christian church is not alone 
in its failure. The Jew's boy is breaking 
away from safe moorings rather faster than 
his brother of the new dispensation. The 
church looks on, but it has no cause for 
congratulation. He is getting nothing in 
place of that which he lost, and the result 
is bad. There is no occasion for profound 
theories about it. The facts are plain 
enough. The new freedom has something 
to do with it, but neglect to look after the 
young has quite as much. Apart from its 
religious aspect, seen from the angle of the 
community's interest wholly, the matter is of 
the gravest import. 

What the boy's play has to do with build- 



146 A TEN YEARS' WAE 

ing character in him Froebel has told us. 
Through it, he showed us, the child "first 
perceives moral relations," and he made 
that the basis of the kindergarten and all 
common-sense education. That prop was 
knocked out. New York never had a chil- 
dren's playground till within the last year. 
Truly it seemed, as Abram S. Hewitt said, 
as if in the early plan of our city the chil- 
dren had not been thought of at alL Such 
moral relations as Jacob was able to make 
out ran parallel with the gutter always, and 
counter to law and order as represented by 
the policeman and the landlord. The land- 
lord had his windows to mind, and the 
poHceman his lamps and the city ordinances 
which prohibit even kite-flying below Four- 
teenth Street where the crowds are. The 
ball had no chance at all. It is not two 
years since a boy was shot down by a police- 
man for the heinous offense of playing foot- 
ball in the street on Thanksgiving Day. 
But a boy who cannot kick a ball around 
has no chance of growing up a decent and 
orderly citizen. He must have his child- 
hood, so that he may be fitted to give to the 
community his manhood. The average boy 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 147 

is just like a little steam engine with steam 
always up. The play is his safety valve. 
With the landlord in the yard and the 
policeman on the street eitting^n hi« safe^ 
valve and holding it down, he is bound to 
explode. When he does, when he throws 
mud and stones and shows us the side of 
him which the gutter developed, we are 
shocked and marvel much what our boys are 
coming to, as if we had any right to expect 
better treatment of them. I doubt if Jacobs 
in the whole course of his wizened little lif e^ 
had ever a hand in an honest game that 
was not haunted by the dread of the avenge 
ing policeman. That he was not ^^ doing 
anything" was no defense. The mere claim 
was proof that he was up to mischief of 
some sort. Besides, the policeman was 
usually right. Play in such a setting be- 
comes a direct incentive to mischief in a 
healthy boy. Jacob was a healthy enough 
little animal. 

Such fun as he had he got out of law- 
breaking in a small way. In this he was 
merely following the ruling fashion. Laws 
were apparently made for no other purpose 
that he could see. Such a view as he en- 



148 A TEN YEARS* WAR 

joyed of their makers and executors at elec- 
tion seasons inspired him with seasonable 
enthusiasm, but hardly with awe. A slogan, 
now, like that raised by Tammany's late can- 
didate for district attorney, — "To hell with 
reform!" — was something he could grasp. 
Of what reform meant he had only the 
vaguest notion, but the thing had the right 
ring to it. Roosevelt preaching enforcement 
of law was from the first a "lobster" to 
him, not to be taken seriously. It is not 
among the least of the merits of the man 
that by his sturdy personality, as well as 
by his unyielding persistence, he won the 
boy over to the passive admission that there 
might be something in it. It had not been 
his experience. 

There was the law which sternly com- 
manded him to go to school, and which he 
laughed at every day. Then there was the 
law to prevent child labor. It cost twenty- 
five cents for a false age certificate to break 
that, and Jacob, if he thought of it at all, 
probably thought of perjury as rather an 
expensive thing. A quarter was a good deal 
to pay for the right to lock a child up in 
a factory, when he ought to have been at 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 149 

play. The excise law was everybody's game. 
The sign that hung in every saloon, say- 
ing that nothing was sold there to minors, 
never yet barred out his " growler " when he 
had the price. There was another such sign 
in the tobacco shop, forbidding the sale of 
cigarettes to boys of his age. Jacob thought 
that when he had the money he smoked 
as many as fifteen packs a day, and he laughed 
when he told me. He laughed, too, when 
he remembered how the boys of the East 
Side took to carrying balls of cord in their 
pockets, on the wave of the Lexow reform, 
on purpose to measure the distance from the 
school door to the nearest saloon. They 
had been told that it should be two hundred 
feet, according to law. There were schools 
that had as many as a dozen within the 
tabooed limits. It was in the papers how, 
when the highest courts said that the law 
was good, the saloon keepers attacked the 
schools as a nuisance and detrimental to pro- 
perty. In a general way Jacob sided with 
the saloon keeper ; not because he had any 
opinion about it, but because it seemed nat- 
ural. Such opinions as he ordinarily had 
he got from that quarter. 



160 A TEN YEARS* WAE 

When, later on, he came to be tried, his 
counsel said to me, '' He is an amazing liar." 
No, hardly amazing. It would have been 
amazing if he had been anything else. Lying 
and mockery were all around him, and he 
adjusted himself to the things that were. 
He lied in self-defense. 

Jacob's story ends here, as far as he is 
personally concerned. The story of the gang 
begins. So trained for the responsibility of 
citizenship, robbed of home and of child- 
hood, with every prop knocked from under 
him, all the elements that make for strength 
and character trodden out in the making 
of the boy, all the high ambition of youth 
caricatured by the slum and become base 
passions, — so equipped he comes to the 
business of life. As a "kid" he hunted 
with the pack in the street. As a young 
man he trains with the gang, because it fur- 
nishes the means of gratifying his inordi- 
nate vanity, that is the slum's counterfeit of 
self-esteem. Upon the Jacobs of other days 
there was a last hold, — the father's au- 
thority. Changed conditions have loosened 
that also. There is a time in every young 
man's life when he knows more than his 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 161 

father. It is like the measles or the mumps^ 
and he gets over it, with a little judicious 
firmness in the hand that guides. It is the 
misfortune of the slum boy of to-day that 
it is really so, and that he knows it. His 
father is an Italian or a Jew, and cannot 
even speak the language to which the boy 
is bom. He has to depend on him in much, 
in the new order of things. The old man 
is " slow," he is " Dutch." He may be an 
Irishman with some advantages ; he is still a 
" foreigner." He loses his grip on the boy. 
Ethical standards of which he has no con- 
ception clash. Watch the meeting of two 
currents in river or bay, and see the line 
of drift that tells of the struggle. So in 
the city's life strive the currents of the old 
and the new, and in the churning the boy 
goes adrift. The last hold upon him is gone. 
That is why the gang appears in the second 
generation, the first born upon the soil,- 
a fighting gang if the Irishman is there 
with his ready fist, a thievish gang if it 
is the East Side Jew, — and disappears in 
the third. The second boy's father is not 
''slow." He has had experience. He was 
clubbed into decency in his own day, and 



162 A TEN YEARS* WAR 

the night stick wore off the glamour of the 
thing. His grip on the boy is good, and 
it holds. 

It depends now upon chance what is to 
become of the lad. But the slum has 
stacked the cards against him. There arises 
in the lawless crowd a leader, who rules 
with his stronger fists or his readier wit. 
Around him the gang crystallizes, and what 
he is it becomes. He may be a thief, like 
David Meyer, a report of whose doings I 
have before me. He was just a bully, and, 
being the biggest in his gang, made the oth- 
ers steal for him and surrender the '' swag,'' 
or take a licking. But that was unusual. 
Ordinarily the risk and the " swag " are dis- 
tributed on more democratic principles. Or 
he may be of the temper of Mike of Pov- 
erty Gap, who was hanged for murder at 
nineteen. While he sat in his cell at police 
headquarters, he told with grim humor of 
the raids of his gang on Saturday nights 
when they stocked up at " the club." They 
used to "hook" a butcher's cart or other 
light wagon, wherever found, and drive like 
mad up and down the avenue, stopping at 
saloon or grocery to throw in what they 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 153 

wanted. His job was to sit at the tail of 
the cart with a six-shooter and pop at any 
chance pursuer. He chuckled at the recol- 
lection of how men fell over one another to 
get out of his way. "It was great to see 
them run," he said. Mike was a tough, but 
with a better chance he might have been a 
hero. The thought came to him, too, when 
it was all over and the end in sight. He 
put it all in one sober, retrospective sigh, 
that had in it no craven shirking of the re- 
sponsibiUty that was properly his : " I never 
had no bringing up." 

There was a meeting some time after his 
death to boom a scheme for "getting the 
boys off the street," and I happened to speak 
of Mike's case. In the audience was a gen- 
tleman of means and position, and his daugh- 
ter, who manifested great interest and joined 
heartily in the proposed movement. A week 
later, I was thunderstruck at reading of the 
arrest of my sympathetic friend's son for 
train-wrecking up the State. The fellow was 
of the same age as Mike. It appeared that 
he was supposed to be attending school, but 
had been reading dime novels instead, until 
he arrived at the point where he " had to 



164 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

kill some one before the end of the month/ ' 
To that end he organized a gang of admir- 
ing but less resourceful comrades. After all, 
the plane of fellowship of Poverty Gap and 
Madison Avenue lies nearer than we often 
suppose. I set the incident down in justice 
to the memory of my friend Mike. If this 
one went astray with so much to pull him 
the right way, and but the single strand 
broken, what then of the other ? 

Mike's was the day of Irish heroics. Since 
their scene was shifted from the East Side 
there has come over there an epidemic of 
child crime of meaner sort, but following 
the same principle of gang organization. It 
is difficult to ascertain the exact extent of it^ 
because of the well-meant but, I am inclined 
to think, mistaken effort on the part of the 
children's societies to suppress the record of 
it for the sake of the boy. Enough testi- 
mony comes from the police and the courts, 
however, to make it clear that thieving is 
largely on the increase among the East Side 
boys. And it is amazing at what an early 
age it begins. When, in the fight for a 
truant school, I had occasion to gather sta- 
tistics upon this subject, to meet the sneer of 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 165 

the educational authorities that the " crimes" 
of street hoys compassed at worst the theft 
of a top or a marble, I found among 278 
prisoners, of whom I had kept the run for 
ten months, two hoys, of four and eight 
years respectively, arrested for breaking into 
a grocery, not to get candy or prunes, but 
to rob the till. The little one was useful to 
" crawl through a small hole." There were 
"burglars" of six and seven years, and five 
in a bunch, the whole gang apparently, at 
the age of eight. "Wild" boys began to 
appear in court at that age. At eleven, I 
had seven thieves, two of whom had a record 
on the police blotter, and an "habitual 
liar ; " at twelve, I had four burglars, three 
ordinary thieves, two arrested for drunken- 
ness, three for assault, and three incendia- 
ries; at thirteen, five burglars, one with a 
" record," as many thieves, one " drunk," 
five charged with assault and one with for- 
gery ; at fourteen, eleven thieves and house- 
breakers, sk highway robbers, -the gang 
on its unlucky day, perhaps, — and ten 
arrested for fighting, not counting one who 
had assaulted a policeman, in a state of 
drunken frenzy. One of the gangs made a 



166 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

specialty of stealing baby carriages, when 
left unattended in front of stores. They 
"drapped the kids in the hallway" and 
" sneaked " the carriages. And so on. The 
recital was not a pleasant one, but it was ef- 
fective. We got our truant school, and one 
way that led to the jail was blocked. 

It may be that the leader is neither thief 
nor thug, but ambitious. In that case the 
gang is headed for politics by the shortest 
route. Likewise, sometimes, when he is 
both. In either case it carries the situation 
by assault. When the gang wants a thing, 
the easiest way seems to it always to take it. 
There was an explosion in a Fifth Street tene- 
ment, one night last January, that threw 
twenty families into a wild panic, and injured 
two of the tenants badly. There was much 
mystery about it, until it came out that the 
housekeeper had had a " run in " with the 
gang in the block. It wanted club-room 
in the house, and she would not let it in. 
Beaten, it avenged itself in characteristic 
fashion by leaving a package of gunpowder 
on the stairs, where she would be sure to 
find it when she went the rounds with her 
candle to close up. That was a gang of that 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 167 

kind, headed straight for Albany. And 
what is more, it will get there, unless things 
change greatly. The gunpowder was just 
a "bluff" to frighten the housekeeper, an 
installment of the kind of politics it meant 
to play when it got its chance. There was 
" nothing against this gang " except a prob- 
able row with the saloon keeper, since it ap- 
plied elsewhere for house-room. Not every 
gang has a police record of theft and 
" slugging " beyond the early encounters of 
the street. " Our honored leader " is not 
always the captain of a band of cutthroats. 
He is the honorary president of the " social 
club " that bears his name, and he counts 
for something in the ward. But the ethical 
standards do not differ. " Do others, or they 
will do you," felicitously adapted from Holy 
Writ for the use of the slum, and the classic 
war-cry, " To the victors the spoils," made 
over locally to read, "I am not in poUtics 
for my health," stiU interpret the creed of 
the political as of the " slugging " gang. 
They drew their inspiration from the same 
source. Of what gang politics means every 
large city in our country has had its experi- 
ence. New York is no exception. History 



• • • > : • 

• ♦ , . ' 



168 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

on the subject is being made yet^ in the 
sight of us all. 

Our business with the gang, however, is 
in the making of it. Take now the showing 
of the reformatory/ to which I have before 
made reference, and see what light it throws 
upon the matter : 71 per cent, of prisoners 
with no moral sense, or next to none, yet 
more than that proportion possessed of " nat- 
ural mental capacity," which is to say that 
they had the means of absorbing it from 
their environment, if there had been any to 
absorb. Bad homes sent half of all prison- 
ers there ; bad company 92 per cent. The 
reformatory repeats the prison chaplain's 
verdict, "weakness, not wickedness,'* in its 
own way : " Malevolence does not character- 
ize the criminal, but aversion to continuous 
labor." If " the street " had been written 
across it in capital letters, it could not have 
been made plainer. Twelve per cent, only 

1 Year-Book of Elmira State Reformatory, 1897. The 
statistics deal with 8319 prisoners received there in twenty- 
three years. The social stratum whence they came is 
8u£Qciently indicated by the statement that 18.3 per cent, 
were illiterates, and 43.3 per cent, were able to read and 
write with difElculty ; 35.2 per cent, had an ordinary com- 
mon school education ; 3.2 per cent, came out of high schools 
or colleges. 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 159 

of the prisoners came from good homes^ and 
one in a hundred had kept good company ; 
evidently he was not of the mentally capable. 
They will tell you at the prison that, under 
its discipline, 83 per cent, are set upon their 
feet and make a fresh start. With due al- 
lowance for a friendly critic, there is still 
room for the three fourths labeled normal. 
The Children's Aid Society will give you 
even better news of the boys rescued from 
the slum before it had branded them for its 
own. Scarce five per cent, are lost, though 
they leave such a black mark that they make 
trouble for all the good boys that are sent 
out from New York. Better than these was 
the kindergarten record in San Francisco. 
New York has no monopoly of the slum. 
Of nine thousand children from the slum- 
miest quarters of that city who had gone 
through the Golden Gate Association's kin- 
dergartens, just one was said to have got 
into jail. The merchants who looked coldly 
on the experiment before brought their gold 
to pay for keeping it up. They were hard- 
headed men of business, and the demonstra- 
tion that schools were better than jails any 
day appealed to them as eminently sane^aud 
practical. ^ , 






160 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

And weU it might. The gang is a di^ 
temper of the slum that writes upon the 
generation it plagues the recipe for its own 
corrective. It is not the night sticky though 
in the acute stage that is not to be dispensed 
with. Neither is it the jail. To put the 
gang behind iron bars affords passing reUef^ 
but it is like treating a symptom without 
getting at the root of the disease. Prophy- 
lactic treatment is clearly indicated. The 
boy who flings mud and stones is entering 
his protest in his own way against the pui^ 
blind policy that gave him jails for schools 
and the gutter for a playground, that gave 
him dummies for laws and the tenement for 
a home. He is demanding his rights, of 
which he has been cheated, — the right to 
his childhood, the right to know the true 
dignity of labor that makes a seK-respecting 
manhood. The gang, rightly understood, is 
our ally, not our enemy. . Like any ailment 
of the body, it is a friend come to tell us of 
something that has gone amiss. The thing 
for us to do is to find out what it is, and set 
it right. 

That is the story of the gang. That we 
haye read and grasped its lesson at last, an 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 161 

item in my morning paper, which I read at 
the breakfast table to-day, bears witness. It 
tells that the League for Political Education 
has set about providing a playground for 
the children up on the West Side, near the 
model tenements which I described. Just 
so ! With a decent home and a chance for 
the boy to grow into a healthy man, his 
political education can proceed without much 
further hindrance. Now let the League for 
Political Education trade off the policeman's 
club for a boys' club, and it may consider 
its course fairly orgfanized. 

I spoke of L Ltinct for the crowd in 
the tenement house boy as evidence that the 
slum had got its grip on him. And it is 
true of him. The experience that the help- 
less poor will not leave their slum when a 
chance of better things is offered is wearily 
familiar to most of us. I recall the indig- 
nant amazement of my good friend, the 
president of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, 
when, of a hundred of the neediest families 
chosen to be the pioneers in the experiment 
of transplanting the crowds of the Ghetto 
to the country, where homes and work were 
waiting for them, only seven wanted to go. 



162 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

They preferred the excitement of the street. 
One has to have resources to face the lone- 
liness of the woods and the fields. We 
have seen what resources the slum has at its 
command. In the boy it laid hold of the 
instinct for organization^ the desire to fall 
in and march in line that belongs to all 
boys, and is not here, as abroad, cloyed with 
miUtary service in the young years, — and 
anyhow is stronger in the American boy 
than in his European brother, — and per- 
verted it to its own use. That is the simple 
secret of the success of the club, the brigade, 
in winning back the boy. It is fighting the 
street with its own weapon. The gang is 
the club run wild. 

How readily it owns the kinship was never 
better shown than by the experience of the 
College Settlement girls, when they first 
went to make friends in the East Side tene- 
ments. I have told it before, but it will 
bear telling again, for it holds the key to 
the whole business. They gathered in the 
drift, all the little embryo gangs that were 
tuning up in the district, and made them 
into clubs, — Young Heroes, Knights of the 
Round Table, and such like; all except one, 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 163 

the oldest, that had begun to make a name 
for itself with the police. That one held 
aloof, observing coldly what went on, to 
make sure it was "straight." They let it 
be, keeping the while an anxious eye upon 
it; until one day there came a delegation 
with the proposition, " If you will let us in, 
we will change and have your kind of a 
gang." Needless to say it was let in. And 
within a year, when, through a false rumor 
that the concern was moving away, there 
was a run on the Settlement's penny provi- 
dent bank, the converted gang proved itself 
its stanchest friend by doing actually what 
John Halifax did, in Miss Mulock's story : 
it brought all the pennies it could raise in 
the neighborhood by hook or by crook and 
deposited them as fast as the resfular patrons 
-thegaaghadooty«tri«>ntothedigm^ 
of a bank account — drew them out, until 
the run ceased. 

The cry "Get the boys off the street" 
that has been raised in our cities, as the real 
gravity of the situation has been made clear, 
has led to the adoption of curfew ordinances 
in many places. Any attempt to fit such a 
scheme to metropolitan life would probably 



164 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

result simply in adding one more dead-letter 
law^ more dangerous than all the rest^ to 
those we have. Besides, the curfew rings 
at nine o'clock. The dangerous hours, when 
the gang is made, are from seven to nine, 
between supper and bedtime. This is the 
gap the club fills out. The boys take to 
the street because the home has nothing to 
keep them there. To lock them up in the 
house would only make them hate it more. 
The club follows the line of least resistance. 
It has only to keep also on the line of com- 
mon sense. It must be a real club, not a 
reformatory. Its proper function is to head 
off the jail. The gang must not run it. 
But rather that than have it help train up a 
band of wretched young cads. The signs 
are not hard to make out. When a boy has 
had his head swelled by his importance as a 
member of the Junior Street-Cleaning Band 
to the point of reproving his mother for 
throwing a banana peel in the street, the 
thing to be done is to take him out and 
spank him, if it is reverting to "the sav- 
agery " of the street. Better a savage than 
a cad. The boys have the making of both 
in them. Their vanity furnishes abundant 



THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 166 

material for the cad, but only when unduly 
pampered. Left to itself, the gang can be 
trusted not to develop that kink. 

It comes down in the end to the personal 
influence that is always most potent in deal- 
ing with these problems. We had a gang 
start up once when my boys were of that 
age, out in the village on Long Island where 
we Uved. It had its headquarters in our 
barn, where it planned divers raids that aimed 
at killing the cat and other like outrages; 
the central fact being that the boys had an 
air rifle, with which it was necessary to mur- 
der something. My wife discovered the con- 
spiracy, and, with woman's wit, defeated it 
by joining the gang. She " gave in wood " 
to the election bonfires, and pulled the safety 
valve upon all the other plots by entering 
into the true spirit of them, — which was 
adventure rather than mischief, — and so 
keeping them ^thin safe lines. She was 
elected an honorary member, and became 
the counselor of the gang in all their little 
scrapes. I can. yet see her dear brow wrin- 
kled in the study of some knotty gang pro- 
blem, which we discussed when the boys 
had been long asleep. They did not dream 



166 A TEN YEAKS' WAR 

of it, and the village never knew what small 
tragedies it escaped, nor who it was that so 
skillfully averted them. 

It is always the women who do those 
things. They are the law and the gospel 
to the boy, both in one. It is the mother 
heart, I suppose, and there is nothing better 
in all the world. I am reminded of the eon- 
version of "the Kid" by one who was in a 
very real sense the mother of a social settle- 
ment uptown, in the latitude of Battle Bow. 
The Edd was driftwood. He had been cast 
off by a drunken father and mother, and 
was living on what he could scrape out of 
ash barrels, and an occasional dime for kin- 
dling-wood which he sold from a wheel- 
barrow, when the gang found and adopted 
him. My friend adopted the gang in her 
turn, and civiUzed it by slow stages. Easter 
Sunday came, when she was to redeem her 
promise to take the boys to witness the ser- 
vices in a neighboring church, where the 
liturgy was especially impressive. It found 
the larger part of the gang at her door, — 
a minority, it was announced, were out steal- 
ing potatoes, hence were excusable, — in a 
state of high indignation. 



THE GENESIS OP THE GANG 167 

"The Kid's been cussin' awful," ex- 
plained the leader. The Kid showed in the 
turbulent distance, red-eyed and raging. 

" But why ? " asked my friend, in amaze- 
ment. 

" 'Cause he can't go to church ! " 

It appeared that the gang had shut him 
out, with a sense of what was due to the 
occasion, because of his rags. Bestored to 
grace, and choking down reminiscent sobs^ 
the Kid sat through the Easter service, sur- 
rounded by the twenty-seven "proper" mem- 
bers of the gang. Civilization had achieved 
a victory, and no doubt my friend remem- 
bered it in her prayers with thanksgiving. 
The manner was of less account. Battle Row 
has its own ways, even in its acceptence of 
means of grace. 

I walked home from the office to-night. 
The street wore its normal aspect of mingled 
dullness and the kind of expectancy that is 
always waiting to turn any excitement, from 
a fallen horse to a fire, to instant account. 
The early June heat had driven the multi- 
tudes from the tenements into the street for 
a breath of air. The boys of the block were 
holding a meeting at the hydrant. In some 



168 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

way they had turned the water on, and were 
splashing in it with bare feet, reveling in 
the sense that they were doing something 
that " went against " their enemy, the police- 
man. Upon the quiet of the evening broke 
a bugle note and the tramp of many feet 
keeping time. A military band came around 
the corner, stepping briskly to the tune of 
"The Stars and Stripes Forever." Their 
white duck trousers glimmered in the twilight, 
as the hundred legs moved as one. Stoops 
and hydrant were deserted with a rush. The 
gang fell in with joyous shouts. The young 
feUow linked arms with his sweetheart and 
fell in too. The tired mother hurried with 
the baby carriage to catch up. The butcher 
came, hot and wiping his hands on his 
apron, to the door to see them pass. 

" Yes," said my companion, guessing my 
thoughts, — we had been speaking of the 
boys, — " but look at the other side. There 
is the military spirit. Do you not fear dan- 
ger from it in this country ? " 

No, my anxious friend, I do not. Let 
them march ; and if with a gun, better still. 
Often enough it is the choice of the gun on 
the shoulder, or, by and by, the stripes on 
the back in the lockstep gang. 



VI 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 

I HAD been out of town and my way had 
not fallen through the Mulbeny Bend in 
weeks until that morning when I came sud- 
denly upon the park that had been made 
there in my absence. Sod had been laid, 
and men were going over the lawn cutting 
the grass after the rain. The sun shone 
upon flowers and the tender leaves of young 
shrubs, and the smell of new-mown hay was 
in the air. Crowds of little Italian chil- 
dren shouted with delight over the ^^ gar- 
den," while their elders sat around upon the 
benches with a look of contentment such as 
I had not seen before in that place. I stood 
and looked at it all, and a lump came in 
my throat as I thought of what it had been, 
and of all the weary years of battling for 
this. It had been such a hard fight, and 
now at last it was won. To me the whole 
battle with the slum had summed itself up 



170 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

in the struggle with this dark spot. The 
whir of the lawn mower was as sweet a 
song in my ear as that which the skylark 
sang when I was a hoy, in Danish fields, 
and which gray hairs do not make the man 
forget. 

In my delight I walked upon the grass. 
It seemed as if I should never he satisfied 
till I had felt the sod under my feet, — sod 
in the Mulberry Bend ! I did not see the 
gray-coated poUceman hastening my way, 
nor the wide-eyed youngsters awaiting with 
shuddering delight the catastrophe that was 
coming, until I felt his cane laid smartly 
across my back and heard his angry com- 
mand : — 

" Hey ! Come off the grass ! D' ye think 
it is made to walk on ? '' 

So that was what I got for it. It is the 
way of the world. But it was all right. 
The park was there, that was the thing. 
And I had my revenge. I had just had a 
hand in marking five blocks of tenements 
for destruction to let in more light, and 
in driving the slum from two other strong- 
holds. Where they were, parks are being 
made to-day in which the sign "Keep off 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 171 

the grass ! " will never be seen. The chil- 
dren may walk in them from morning tiU 
night, and I too, if I want to, with no police- 
man to drive us ojff. I tried to tell the police- 
man something about it. But he was of the 
old dispensation. All the answer I got was 
a gruff : — 

" G'wan now ! I don't want none o' yer 
guff!'' 

It was all ^^ guff " to the politicians, I sup- 
pose, from the day the trouble began about 
the Mulberry Bend, but toward the end they 
woke up nobly. When the park was finally 
dedicated to the people's use, they took 
charge of the celebration with immense unc- 
tion, and invited themselves to sit in the 
high seats and glory in the achievement 
which they had done little but hamper and 
delay from the first. They had not reckoned 
with Colonel Waring, however. When they 
had had their say, the colonel arose and, 
curtly reminding them that they had really 
had no hand in the business, proposed three 
cheers for the citizen effort that had struck 
the slum this staggering blow. There was 
rather a feeble response on the platform, 
but rousing cheers from the crowd, with 



172 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

whom the colonel was a prime favorite, and 
no wonder. Two years later he laid down 
his life in the fight which he so valiantly 
and successfully waged. It is the simple 
truth that he was killed by politics. The 
services which he had rendered the city 
would have entitled him in any reputable 
business to be retained in the employment 
that was his life and his pride. Had he 
been so retained he would not have gone 
to Cuba, and would in all human probabil- 
ity be now alive. But Tammany is not " in 
politics for her health " and had no use for 
him, though no more grievous charge could 
be laid at his door, even in the heat of the 
campaign, than that he was a " foreigner," 
being from Rhode Island. Spoils politics 
never craved a heavier sacrifice of any com- 
munity. 

It was Colonel Waring's broom that first 
let light into the slum. That which had 
come to be considered an impossible task he 
did by the simple formula of "putting a 
man instead of a voter behind every broom." 
The words are his own. The man, from a 
political dummy who loathed his job and him- 
self in it with cause, became a self-respecting 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 173 

citizen, and the streets that had been dirty 
were swept. The ash barrels which had be^ 
fouled the sidewalks disappeared, almost with- 
out any one knowing it till they were gone. 
The trucks that obstructed the children's only 
playground, the street, went with the dirt de- 
spite the opposition of the truckman who had 
traded off his vote to Tammany in the past 
for stall room at the curbstone. They did 
not go without a struggle. When appeal to 
the alderman proved useless, the truckman 
resorted to strategy. He took a wheel off, 
or kept a perishing nag, that could not walk, 
hitched to the truck over night to make it 
appear that it was there for business. But 
subterfuge availed as little as resistance. In 
the Mulberry Bend he made his last stand. 
The old houses had been torn down, leaving 
a three-acre lot full of dirt mounds and cel- 
lar holes. Into this the truckmen of the 
Sixth Ward hauled their carts, and defied 
the street cleaners. They were no longer in 
their way, and they were on the Park De- 
partment's domain, where no Colonel Waring 
was in control. But while their owners were 
triumphing, the children playing among the 
trucks set one of them rolling down into a 



174 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

cellar, and three or four of the little ones 
were crushed. That was the end. The trucks 
disappeared. Even Tammany has not ven- 
tured to put them back, so great was the 
relief of their going. They were not only a 
hindrance to the sweeper and the skulking 
places of all manner of mischief at night, 
but I have repeatedly seen the firemen baffled 
in their efforts to reach a burning house, 
where they stood four and six deep in the 
wide " sUps " at the river. 

Colonel Waring did more for the cause of 
labor than all the walking delegates of the 
town together, by investing a despised but 
highly important task with a dignity which 
won the hearty plaudits of a grateful city. 
When he uniformed his men and announced 
that he was going to parade with them so 
that we might all see what they were like, the 
town laughed and poked fun at the " white 
wings ; " but no one went to see them who 
did not come away converted to an enthusi- 
astic belief in the man and his work. Pub- 
lic sentiment, that had been half reluctantly 
suspending judgment, expecting every day to 
see the colonel " knuckle down to politics " 
like his predecessors, turned in an hour, and 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 176 

after that there was little trouble. The tene- 
ment house children organized street clean- 
ing bands to help along the work, and Colonel 
Waring enlisted them as regular auxiliaries 
and made them useful. 

They had no better friend. When the 
unhappy plight of the persecuted pushcart 
men, aU immigrant Jews, who were black- 
mailed, robbed, and driven from pillar to 
post as a nuisance, though licensed to trade 
in the street, appealed vainly for a remedy, 
Colonel Waring found a way out in a great 
morning market in Hester Street that should 
be turned over to the children for a play- 
ground in the afternoon. Though he proved 
that it would pay interest on the investment 
in market fees, and many times in the chil- 
dren's happiness, it was never built. It 
would have been a most fitting monument to 
the man's memory. His broom saved more 
lives in the crowded tenements than a squad 
of doctors. It did more : it swept the cob- 
webs out of our civic brain and conscience, 
and set up a standard of a citizen's duty 
which, however we may for the moment for- 
get, will be ours until we have dragged other 
things than our pavements out of the mud. 



176 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

Even the colonel's broom would have been 
powerless to do that for " the Bend." That 
was hopeless and had to go. There was no 
question of children or playground involved. 
The worst of all the gangs, the Why(5s, had 
its headquarters in the darkest of its dark al- 
leys ; but it was left to the police. We had 
not begun to understand that the gangs 
meant something to us beyond murder and 
vengeance, in those days. No one suspected 
that they had any such roots in the soil that 
they could be killed by merely destrojdng 
the slum. The cholera was rapping an our 
door and, with the Bend there, we felt about 
it as a man with stolen goods in his house 
must feel when the policeman comes up the 
street. Back in the seventies we began dis- 
cussing what ought to be done. By 1884 
the first Tenement House Commission had 
summoned up courage to propose that a 
street be cut through the bad block. In the 
following year a bill was brought in to de- 
stroy it bodily, and then began the long 
fight that resulted in the defeat of the slum 
a dozen years later. 

It was a bitter fight, in which every 
position of the enemy had to be carried by 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 177 

assault. The enemy was the deadly official 
inertia that was the outcome of political cor- 
ruption born of the slum plus the indiffer- 
ence of the mass of our citizens^ who prob- 
ably had never seen the Bend. If I made 
it my own concern to the exclusion of all 
else, it was only because I knew it. I had 
been part of it. Homeless and alone, I had 
sought its shelter, not for long, — that was 
not to be endured, — but long enough to 
taste of its poison, and I hated it. I knew 
that the blow must be struck there, to kill. 
Looking back now over those years, I can 
see that it was all as it should be. We were 
learning the alphabet of our lesson then. 
We could have learned it in no other way so 
thoroughly. Before we had been at it more 
than two or three years, it was no longer 
a question of the Bend merely. The Small 
Parks law that gave us a million dollars a 
year to force light and air into the slum, to 
its destruction, grew out of it. The whole 
sentiment which in its day, groping blindly 
and angrily, had wiped out the disgrace 
of the Five Points, just around the corner, 
crystallized and took shape in its fight. It 
waited merely for the issue of that, to attack 



178 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

the slum in its other strongholds ; and no 
sooner was the Bend gone than the rest sur- 
rendered, unconditionally. 

But it was not so easy campaigning at the 
start. In 1888 plans were filed for the demo- 
lition of the block. It took four years to 
get a report of what it would cost to tear it 
down. About once in two months during all 
that time the authorities had to be prodded 
into a spasm of activity, or we would proba- 
bly have been yet where we were then. Once 
when I appealed to the Corporation Counsel 
to give a good reason for the delay, I got the 
truth out of him without evasion. 

" WeU, I tell you," he said blandly, "no 
one here is taking any interest in that busi- 
ness. That is good enough reason for you, 
isn't it?" 

It was. That Tammany reason became 
the slogan of an assault upon official incom- 
petence and treachery that hurried things up 
considerably. The property was condemned 
at a total cost to the city of a million and a 
half, in round numbers, including the assess- 
ment of half a million for park benefit which 
the property owners were quick enough, with 
the aid of the poUticians, to get saddled on 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 179 

the city at large. In 1894 the city took 
possession and became the landlord of the 
old barracks. For a whole year it compla- 
cently collected the rents and did nothing. 
When it was shamed out of that rut, too, 
and the tenements were at last torn down, 
the square lay as the wreckers had left it for 
another year, until it became such a plague 
spot that, as a last resort, with a citizen's 
privilege, I arraigned the municipality be- 
fore the Board of Health for maintaining a 
nuisance upon its premises. I can see the 
shocked look of the official now, as he 
studied the complaint. 

"But, my dear sir," he coughed diplo- 
matically, " is n't it rather unusual ? I never 
heard of such a thing." 

"Neither did I," I repUed, "but then 
there never was such a thing before." 

That night, while they were debating the 
"unusual thing," happened the accident to 
the children of which I spoke, emphasizing 
the charge that the nuisance was " dangerous 
to life," and there was an end. In the morn- 
ing the Bend was taken in hand, and the 
following spring the Mulberry Bend Park 
was opened. 



e 



180 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

A million dollars a year had been lost 
while we were learning our lesson. The 
Small Parks Fond was not cumulative, and 
when it came to paying for the Bend a 
special bill had to be passed to authorize it, 
the award being " more than one miUion in 
one year." The wise financiers who framed 
and hung in the comptroller's office a check 
for three cents that had been under-paid on 
a school site, for the taxpayer to bow be- 
fore in awe and admiration at such business 
methods, could find no way to make the 
appropriation for two years apply, though 
the new year was coming in in a week or 
two. But the Gilder Tenement House Com- 
mission had been sitting, the Committee of 
Seventy had been at work, and a law was on 
the statute books authorizing the expenditure 
of three million dollars for two open spaces 
in the parkless district on the East Side, 
where Jacob Beresheim was born. It had 
shown that while the proportion of park 
area inside the limits of the old city was 
equal to one thirteenth of all, below Four- 
teenth Street, where one third of the people 
lived, it was barely one fortieth. It took a 
citizen's committee appointed by the mayor 



,•• 



u • • • • 







LETTING IN THE LIGHT 181 

just three weeks to seke the two sites which 
are now being laid out in playgrounds chiefly, 
and it took the Good Government Clubs with 
their allies at Albany less than two months 
to get warrant of law for the tearing down 
of the houses ahead of final condemnation 
lest any mischance befall through delay or 
otherwise, — a precaution which subsequent 
events proved to be eminently wise. The 
slow legal proceedings are going on yet. 

The playground part of it was a provi- 
sion of the Gilder law that showed what apt 
scholars we had been. I was a member of 
that committee, and I fed fat my grudge 
against the slum tenement, knowing that I 
might not again have such a chance. Bone 
Alley went. I shall not soon get the picture 
of it, as I saw it last, out of my mind. I 
had wandered to the top floor of one of the 
ramshackle tenements in the heart of the 
block, to a door that stood ajar, and pushed 
it open. On the floor lay three women rag- 
pickers with their burdens, asleep, overcome 
by the heat and the beer, the stale stench 
of which filled the place. Swarms of flies 
covered them. The room — no! let it go. 
Thank God, we shall not again hear of Bone 



182 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

Alley. Where it stood workmen are to-day 
building a gymnasium with baths for the 
people, and a playground and park which 
may even be turned into a skating-pond in 
winter if the architect keeps his promise. A 
skating-pond for the children of the Eleventh 
Ward! No wonder the politician is in a 
hurry to take the credit for what is going 
forward over there. It is that or nothing 
with him now. It will be all up with Tam- 
many, once the boys find out that these were 
the things she withheld from them all the 
years, for her own gain. 

Half a dozen blocks away the city's first 
public bath house is at last going up, after 
many delays, and godliness will have a 
chance to move in with cleanliness. The 
two are neighbors everywhere, but in the 
slum the last must come first. Glasgow has 
half a dozen public baths. Rome, two thou- 
sand years ago, washed its people most sedu- 
lously, and in heathen Japan to-day, I am 
told, there are baths, as we have saloons, on 
every corner. Christian New York never had 
a bath house. In a tenement population 
of 255,033 the Gilder Committee found only 
306 who had access to bath-rooms in the 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 183 

houses where they lived. The Church Fed- 
eration canvass of the Fifteenth Assembly 
District counted three bath-tubs to 1321 f am- 
iKes. Nor was that because they so elected. 
The People's Baths took in 115,000 half 
dimes last year for as many baths, and forty 
per cent, of their customers were Italians. 
The free river baths admitted 5,096,876 
customers during the summer. The '' great 
unwashed " were not so from choice, it would 
appear. 

Bone Alley brought thirty-seven dollars 
under the auctioneer's hammer. Thieves' 
Alley, in the other park down at Kutgers 
Square, where the police clubbed the Jewish 
cloakmakers a few years ago for the offense 
of gathering to assert their right to " being 
men, live the life of men," as some one who 
knew summed up the labor movement, 
brought only seven dollars, and the old Hel- 
vetia House, where Boss Tweed and his 
gang met at night to plan their plundering 
raids on the city's treasury, was knocked 
down for five. Kerosene Row would not 
have brought enough to buy kindling wood 
with which to start one of the numerous 
fires that gave it its bad name. It was in 



184 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

Thieves' Alley that the owner in the days 
long gone by hung out the sign : " No Jews 
need apply." Last week I watched the open- 
ing of the first municipal playground upon 
the site of the old alley, and in the thou- 
sands that thronged street and tenements 
from curb to roof with thunder of applause, 
there were not twoscore who could have 
found lodging with the old Jew-baiter. He 
had to go with his alley before the better 
day could bring light and hope to the Tenth 
Ward. 

In all this the question of rehousing the 
population, that had to be so carefully con- 
sidered abroad in the destruction of slums, 
gave no trouble. The speculative builder 
had seen to that. In the five wards, the 
Seventh, Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth, and 
Seventeenth, in which the unhoused ones 
would look for room, if they wanted to stay 
near their old home, there were, according 
to the tenement census at the time when the 
old houses were torn down, 4268 vacant 
apartments, with room for more than 18,000 
persons at our average of four and a half to 
the family. Even including the Mulberry 
Bend, the whole number of the dispossessed 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 186 

was not 10,000. On Manhattan Island 
there were at this time more than 37,000 va- 
cant apartments, so that the question could 
not arise in any serious shape, much as it 
plagued the dreams o£ some well-meaning 
people. As a matter of fact the unhoused 
were scattered much more widely than had 
been anticipated, which was one of the very 
purposes sought to be attained. Many of 
them had remained in their old slum more 
from force of habit and association than be- 
cause of necessity. 

^^ Everything takes ten years," said Abram 
S. Hewitt when, exactly ten years after he 
had as mayor championed the Small Parks 
Act, he took his seat as chairman of the Ad- 
visory Committee on Small Parks. The ten 
years had wrought a great change. It was 
no longer the slum of to-day, but that of 
to-morrow that challenged attention. The 
committee took the point of view of the chil- 
dren from the first. It had a large map 
prepared showing where in the city there 
was room to play and where there was none. 
Then it called in the police and asked them 
to point out where there was trouble with 
the boys ; and in every instance the police- 
man put his finger upon a treeless slum. 



186 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

'' They have no other playground than the 
street," was the explanation given in each 
case. ^^They smash lamps and break win- 
dows. The storekeepers kick and there is 
trouble. That is how it begins." "Many 
complaints are received daily of boys annoy- 
ing pedestrians, storekeepers, and tenants by 
their continually playing baseball in some 
parts of almost every street. The damage 
is not slight. Arrests are frequent, much 
more frequent than when they had open lots 
to play in." This last was the report of an 
uptown captain. He remembered the days 
when there were open lots there. "But 
these lots are now built upon," he said, " and 
for every new house there are more boys 
and less chance for them to play." 

The committee put a red daub on the 
map to indicate trouble. Then it asked 
those police captains who had not spoken to 
show them where theur precincts were, and 
why they had no trouble. Every one of 
them put his finger on a green spot that 
marked a park. " My people are quiet and 
orderly," said the captain of the Tompkins 
Square precinct. The police took the square 
from a mob by storm twice in my recoUec- 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 187 

tioD^ and the commander of the precinct 
then was hit on the head with a hammer by 
^^ his people " and laid out for dead. '' The 
Hook Gang is gone," said he o£ Corlears 
Hook. The professional pursuit of that 
gang was to rob and murder inoffensive citi- 
zens by night and throw them into the river, 
and it achieved a bad eminence at its call- 
ing. '^ The whole neighborhood has taken 
a change, and decidedly for the better," said 
the captain of Mulberry Street, and the 
committee rose and said that it had heard 
enough. 

The map was hung on the wall, and in it 
were stuck pins to mark the site of present 
and projected schools as showing where the 
census had found the children crowding. 
The moment that was done the committee 
sent the map and a copy of chapter 338 of 
the laws of 1895 to the mayor, and reported 
that its task was finished. This is the law 
and all there is of it : — 

"The people of the State of New York, 
represented in Senate and Assembly, do 
enact as follows : — 

"Section 1. Hereafter no schoolhouse 
shall be constructed in the city of New York 



188 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

without an open-air playgnround attached to 
or used in connection Jlthe same. 

'' Section 2. This act shall take effect im- 
mediately." 

Where the map was daubed with red the 
school pins crowded one another. On the 
lower East Side, where child crime was grow- 
ing fast, and no less than three storm cen- 
tres were marked down by the police, nine 
new schools were going up or planned, and 
in the uptown precinct whence came the 
wail about the ball players there were seven. 
The playground had proved its case. Where 
it was expedient it was to be a school play- 
ground. It seemed a happy combination, 
for the new law had been a stumbling-block 
to the school commissioners, who were in a 
quandary over the needful size of an ^^ open- 
air playground." The success of the roof- 
garden idea suggested a way out. But 
schools are closed at the time of the year 
when playgrounds are most needed for city 
children. To get the garden on the roof 
of the schoolhouse recognized as the public 
playground seemed a long step toward turn- 
ing it into a general neighborhood evening 
resort that should be always open, and so 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 189 

toward bringing school and people, and es- 
pecially the school and the boy, together in 
a bond of mutual sympathy highly desirable 
for both. 

That was the burden of the committee's 
report. It made thirteen recommendations 
besides, as to the location of parks and de- 
tached playgrounds, only one of which has 
been adopted. But that is of less account 
— as also was the information imparted to 
me as secretary of the committee by our 
peppery Tammany mayor, that we had ^^ as 
much authority as a committee of bootblacks 
in his office" — than the fact that the field 
has at last been studied and its needs have 
been made known. The rest will follow, 
with or without the politician's authority. 
The one recommendation that has been 
carried out was that of a riverside park in 
the region uptown on the West Side where 
the Federation of Churches and Christian 
Workers found '' saloon social ideals minting 
themselves upon the minds of the people at 
the rate of seven saloon thoughts to one 
educational thought." There is an outdoor 
gymnasium to-day on the chosen site, — 
while the legal proceedings to take possession 



190 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

are unraveling their red tape, — and a recre- 
ation pier hard by. In the evening the 
young men of the neighborhood may be seen 
trooping riverward with their girls to hear 
the music. The gang that '^ laid out " two 
policemen, to my knowledge, has gone out 
of business. 

The best laid plans are sometimes upset 
by surprising snags. We had planned for 
two municipal playgrounds on the East Side 
where the need is greatest, and our plans 
were eagerly accepted by the city authori- 
ties. But they were never put into practice. 
A negligent attorney killed one, a lazy clerk 
the other. And both served under the re- 
form government. The first of the two 
playgrounds was to have been in Rivington 
Street, adjoining the new public bath, where 
the boys, for want of something better to 
do, were fighting daily battles with stones, 
to the great damage of windows and the 
worse aggravation of the householders. 
Four hundred children in that neighborhood 
petitioned the committee for a place of their 
own where there were no windows to break, 
and we found one. It was only after the 
proceedings had been started that we discov- 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 191 

ered that they had been taken under the 
wrong law and the money spent in advertis- 
ing had been wasted. It was then too late. 
The daily assaults upon the windows were 
resumed. The other case was an attempt to 
establish a model school park in a block 
where more than four thousand children at- 
tended day and night school. The public 
school and the pro-cathedral, which divided 
the children between them, were to be allowed 
to stand, at opposite ends o£ the block. The 
surrounding tenements were to be torn down 
to make room for a park and playground 
which should embody the ideal of what such a 
place ought to be, in the opinion of the com- 
mittee. The roof garden was not in the ori- 
ginal plan except as an alternative of the 
street-level playground, where land came too 
high. The plentiful supply of hght and air, 
the safety from fire to be obtained by putting 
the school in a park, beside the fact that it 
could thus be "built beautiful," were con- 
siderations of weight. Plans were made, and 
there was great rejoicing in Essex Street, 
until it came out that this scheme had gone 
the way of the other. The clerk who should 
have filed the plans in the register's office 



192 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

left that duty to some one else^ and it took 
just twenty-one days to make the journey, 
a distance o£ five hundred feet or less. The 
Greater New York had come then with Tam- 
many, and the thing was not heard of again. 
When I traced the failure down to the clerk 
in question, and told him that he had killed 
the park, he yawned and said : — 

" Yes, and I think it is just as well it is 
dead. We haven't any money for those 
things. It is very nice to have small parks, 
and very nice to have a horse and wagon, if 
you can afford it. But we can't. Why, 
there is n't money enough to run the city 
government." 

So the labor of weary weeks and months 
in the children's behalf was all undone by a 
third-rate clerk in an executive office ; but he 
saved the one thing he had in mind : the city 
government is " run " to date, and his pay is 
secure. 

Neither stupidity, spite, nor the false cry 
that ^^ reform extravagance " has wrecked 
the city's treasury will be able much longer, 
however, to cheat the child out of his rights. 
The playground is here to wrestle with the 
gang for the boy, and it will win. It came 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 193 

SO quietly that we hardly knew of it till we 
heard the shouts. It took us seven years to 
make up our minds to build a play pier, — 
recreation pier is its municipal title,— and 
it took just about seven weeks to build it 
when we got so far; but then we learned 
more in one day than we had dreamed of in 
the seven years. Half the East Side swarmed 
over it with shrieks of delight, and carried 
the mayor and the city government, who had 
come to see the show, fairly off their feet. 
And now " we are seven," or will be when 
the one in Brooklyn has been built, — great, 
handsome structures, seven hundred feet 
long, some of them, with music every night 
for mother and the babies, and for papa, 
who can smoke his pipe there in peace. The 
moon shines upon the quiet river, and the 
steamers go by with their lights. The street 
is far away with its noise. The young 
people go sparking in all honor, as it is their 
right to do. The councilman who spoke the 
other day of ** pernicious influences" lying 
in wait for them there made the mistake of 
his life, unless he has made up his mind 
to go out of politics. The play piers have 
taken a hold of the people which no crabbed 



194 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

old bachelor can loosen with trumped-up 
charges. Their civilizing influence upon the 
children is already felt in a reported demand 
for more soap in the neighborhood where 
they are, and even the grocer smiles ap- 
proval. 

The play pier is the kindergarten in the 
educational campaign against the gang. It 
gives the little ones a chance. Often enough 
it is a chance for life. The street as a 
playground is a heavy contributor to the 
undertaker's bank account. I kept the po- 
lice slips of a single day in May two years 
ago, when four httle ones were killed and 
three crushed under the wheels of trucks 
in tenement streets. That was unusual, 
bat no day has passed in my recoUection 
that has not had its record of accidents 
which bring grief as deep and lasting to the 
humblest home as if it were the pet of some 
mansion on Fifth Avenue that was slain. 
The kindergarten teaching bore fruit. To- 
day there are half a dozen full-blown play- 
grounds downtown and uptown where the 
children swarm. Private initiative set the 
pace, but the idea has been engrafted upon 
the municipal plan. The city helped get at 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 196 

least one of them under way. The Outdoor 
Becreation. League was organized last year 
by public-spirited citizens^ including many 
amateur athletes and enthusiastic women, 
with the object of ^^ obtaining recognition of 
the necessity for recreation and physical ex- 
ercise as fundamental to the moral and phy- 
sical welfare of the people." Together with 
the Social Reform Club and the Federation 
of Churches and Christian Workers it main- 
tained a playground on the uptown West 
Side last summer. The ball came into play 
there for the first time as a recognized factor 
in civic progress. The day might well be 
kept for all time among those that mark 
human emancipation, for it was social reform 
and Christian work in one, of the kind that 
tells. 

Only the year before, the athletic clubs 
had vainly craved the privilege of estab- 
lishing a gymnasium in the East River Park, 
where the children wistfully eyed the sacred 
grass, and cowered under the withering gaze 
of the policeman. A friend whose house 
stands opposite the park found them one 
day swanning over her stoop in such shoaJs 
that she could not enter, and asked them 



196 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

why they did not play tag under the trees in- 
stead. The instant shout came back : '' 'Cause 
the cop won't let us." Now a splendid gym- 
nasium has been opened on the site of the 
people's park that is to come at Fifty-Third 
Street and Eleventh Avenue. It is called 
Hudsonbank. A board fence more than a 
thousand feet long surrounds it. The director 
pointed out to me with pride, last week, that 
not a board had been stolen from it in a 
year, while other fences within twenty feet of 
it were ripped to pieces. And he was right. 
The neighborhood is one that has been any- 
thing but distinguished for its respect for 
private property in the past, and where boards 
have a market value among the Irish settlers. 
Better testimony could not have been borne 
to the spirit in which the gift was accepted 
by the children. 

Poverty Gap, that was fairly transformed 
by one brief season's experience with its 
" Holy Terror Park," ^ a dreary sand lot 
upon the site of the old tenements in which 
the Alley Gang once murdered the one good 
boy of the block for the offense of support- 
ing his aged parents by his work as a baker's 

^ The name was bestowed before the fact, not after. 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 197 

apprentice, — Poverty Gap is to have its per- 
manent playground, and Mulberry Bend and 
Corlears Hook are down on the League's 
books; which is equivalent to saying that 
they, too, will shortly know the climbing pole 
and the vaulting buck. For years the city's 
only playground that had any claim upon 
the name — and that was only a httle as- 
phalted strip behind a pubhc school in First 
Street — was an old graveyard. We strug- 
gled vainly to get possession of another, long 
abandoned. The dead were of more account 
than the living. But now at last it is their 
turn. The other day I watched the children 
at their play in the new Hester Street gym- 
nasium. The dusty square was jammed with 
a mighty multitude. It was not an ideal spot, 
for it had not rained in weeks, and powdered 
sand and cinders had taken wing and floated 
like a pall over the perspiring crowd. But 
it was heaven to them. A hundred men and 
boys stood in line, waiting their turn upon 
the bridge ladder and the traveling rings 
that hung full of struggling and squirm- 
ing humanity, groping madly for the next 
grip. No failure, no rebuff discouraged them. 
Seven boys and girls rode with looks of deep 



198 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

concern — it is their way — upon each end 
o£ the see-saw, and two squeezed into each of 
the forty swings that had room for one, while 
a hundred counted time and saw that none 
had too much. It is an article of faith with 
these children that nothing that is ^^ going " 
for their benefit is to be missed. Sometimes 
the result provokes a smile, as when a band of 
young Jews, starting up a club, called them- 
selves the Christian Heroes. It was meant 
partly as a compliment, I suppose, to the ladies 
that gave them club-room ; but at the same 
time, if there was anything in a name, they 
were bound to have it. It is rather to cry 
over than to laugh at, if one but understands 
it. The sight of these little ones swarming 
over a sand heap until scarcely an inch of it 
was in sight, and gazing in rapt admiration 
at the poor show of a dozen geraniums and 
English ivy plants in pots on the window-sill 
of the overseer's cottage, was pathetic in the 
extreme. They stood for ten minutes at a 
time resting their eyes upon them. In the 
crowd were aged women and bearded men 
with the inevitable Sabbath silk hat, who it 
seemed could never get enough of it. They 
moved slowly, when crowded out, looking 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 199 

back many times at the enchanted spot^ as 
long as it was in sight. 

Perhaps there was in it, on the part o£ the 
children at least, just a little bit of the com- 
forting sense of proprietorship. They had 
contributed of their scant pennies more than 
a hundred dollars toward the opening of the 
playground, and they felt that it was their 
very own. All the better. Two policemen 
watched the passing show, grinning. But 
their clubs hung idly from their belts. The 
words of a little woman whom I met last 
year in Chicago kept echoing in my ear. 
She was the "happiest woman alive," for 
she had striven long for a playground for 
her poor children, and had got it. 

" The police like it," she said. " They say 
that it will do more good than all the Sunday 
schools in Chicago. The mothers say, ^ This 
is good business.' The carpenters that put 
up the swings and things worked with a will ; 
everybody was glad. The police lieutenant 
has had a tree called after him. The boys 
that did that used to be terrors. Now they 
take care of the trees. They plead for a low 
Umb that is in the way, that no one may cut 
it off." 



200 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

The twilight deepens and the gates o£ the 
playground are closed. The crowds disperse 
slowly. In the roof garden on the Hebrew In- 
stitute across East Broadway lights are twin- 
kling and the band is tuning up. Little groups 
are settUng down to a quiet game of check- 
ers or love-making. Paterfamilias leans back 
against the parapet where palms wave lux- 
uriously in the summer breeze. The news- 
paper drops from his hand ; he closes his eyes 
and is in dreamland, where steikes come not. 
Mother knits contentedly in her seat, with a 
smile on her face that was not born of the 
Ludlow Street tenement. Over yonder a knot 
of black-browed men talk with serious mien. 
They might be met any night in the an- 
archist cafe, half a dozen doors away, hold- 
ing forth against empires. Here wealth does 
not excite their wrath, nor power their plot- 
ting. In the roof garden anarchy is harm- 
less, even though a policeman typifies its 
government. They laugh pleasantly to one 
another as he passes, and he gives them a 
match to light their cigars. It is Thursday, 
and smoking is permitted. On Friday it is 
discouraged because it offends the orthodox, 
to whom the lighting of a fire, even the 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 201 

holding of a candle, is anathema on the Sab- 
bath eve. 

The band plays on. One after another, 
tired heads droop upon babes slumbering 
peacefully at the breast. Ludlow Street, the 
tenement, are forgotten ; eleven o'clock is 
not yet. Down along the silver gleam of 
the river a mighty city slumbers. The great 
bridge has hung out its string of shining 
pearls from shore to shore. ^^ Sweet land 
of liberty!" Overhead the dark sky, the 
stars that twinkled their message to the shep- 
herds on Judaean hills, that lighted their sons 
through ages of slavery, and the flag of free- 
dom borne upon the breeze, — down there 
the tenement, the — Ah, well ! let us forget, 
as do these. 

Now if you ask me : ^^ And what of it 
all ? What does it avail ? " let me take you 
once more back to the Mulberry Bend, and 
to the poUceman's verdict add the poUce re- 
porter's story of what has taken place there. 
In fifteen years I never knew a week to pass 
without a murder there, rarely a Sunday. It 
was the wickedest, as it was the foulest, spot 
in all the city. In the slum the two are 
interchangeable terms for reasons that are 



202 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

clear enough to me. But I shall not specu- 
late about it, only state the facts. The old 
houses fairly reeked with outrage and vio- 
lence. When they were torn down, I counted 
seventeen deeds of blood in that place which 
I myseU remembered, and those I had for- 
gotten probably numbered seven times seven- 
teen. The district attorney connected more 
than a score of murders of his own recol- 
lection with Bottle Alley, the Whj6 gang's 
headquarters. Two years have passed since 
it was made into a park, and scarce a knife 
has been drawn, or a shot fired, in all that 
neighborhood. Only twice have I been called 
as a poHce reporter to the spot. It is not 
that the murder has moved to another neigh- 
borhood, for there has been no increase of 
violence in Little Italy or wherever else the 
crowd went that moved out. It is that the 
Hght has come in and made crime hideous. 
It is being let in wherever the slum has bred 
murder and robbery, bred the gang, in the 
past. Wait, now, another ten years, and let 
us see what a story there will be to tell. 

Avail ? Why, here is Tammany actually 
applauding Comptroller CoWs words in 
Plymouth Church last night : " Whenever 



LETTING IN THE LIGHT 203 

the city builds a schoolhouse upon the site 
of a dive and creates a park, a distinct 
and permanent mental, moral, and physical 
improvement has been made, and public 
opinion will sustain such a policy, even if a 
dive-keeper is driven out of business and 
somebody's ground rent is reduced." And 
Tammany's press agent sends forth this 
paean : " In the light of such events how 
absurd it is for the enemies of the organi- 
zation to contend that Tammany is not the 
greatest moral force in the community." 
Tammany a moral force ! The park and the 
playground have availed, then, to bring back 
the day of miracles. 



vn 

JUSTIOB FOR THE BOY 

Sometimes, when I see my litde boy hug- 
ging himself with delight at the near prospect 
of the kindergarten, I go back in memory 
forty years and more to the day when I was 
dragged, a howHng captive, to school, as a 
punishment for being bad at home. I re- 
member, as though it were yesterday, my 
progress up the street in the vengeful grasp 
of an exasperated servant, and my reception 
by the aged monster — most fitly named 
Madame Bruin — who kept the school. She 
asked no questions, but led me straightway 
to the cellar, where she plunged me into an 
empty barrel and put the lid on over me. 
Applying her horn goggles to the bunghole, 
to my abject terror, she informed me, in a 
sepulchral voice, that that was the way bad 
boys were dealt with in school. When I 
ceased howUng from sheer fright, she took 
me out and conducted me to the yard, where 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 20B 

a big hog had a corner to itself. She bade 
me observe that one of its ears had been slit 
half its length. It was because the hog was 
lazy, and little boys who were that way 
minded were in danger of similar treatment ; 
in token whereof she cUpped a pair of tailor's 
shears suggestively close to my ear. It was 
my first lesson in school. I hated it from 
that hour. 

The barrel and the hog were never part of 
the curriculum in any American boy's school, 
I suppose ; they seem too freakish to be cred- 
ited to any but the demoniac ingenuity of 
my home ogre. But they stood for a com- 
prehension of the ofi&ce of school and teacher 
which was not patented by any day or land. 
It is not so long since the notion yet pre- 
vailed that the schools were principally to 
lock children up in for the convenience of 
their parents, that we should have entirely 
forgotten it. Only the other day a clergy- 
man from up the State came into my ofi&ce 
to tell of a fine reform school they had in his 
town. They were very proud of it. 

" And how about the schools for the good 
boys in your town ? " I asked, when I had 
heard him out. " Are they anything to be 
proud of ? " 



206 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

He stared. He guessed they were all 
right, he said, after some hesitation. But it 
was clear that he did not know. 

It is not necessary to go back forty years 
to find us in the metropolis upon the clergy- 
man's platform, if not upon Madame Bruin's. 
Ten will do. They will bring us to the day 
when roof playgrounds were contemptuously 
left out of the estimates for an East Side 
school, as ^^ frills " that had nothing to do 
with education ; when the Board of Health 
found but a single pubUc school in more 
than sixscore that was so ventilated as to 
keep the children from being poisoned by 
foul air ; when the authority of the Talmud 
had to be invoked by the Superintendent of 
School Buildings to convince the president 
of the Board of Education, who happened to 
be a Jew, that seventy-five or eighty pupils 
were far too many for one class-room ; when 
a man who had been dead a year was ap- 
pointed a school trustee of the Third Ward, 
under the mouldy old law surviving from the 
day when New York was a big village, and 
filled the office as well as if he had been alive, 
because there were no schools in his ward ; 
when manual training and the kindergarten 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 207 

were yet the fads of yesterday, looked at 
askance ; when fifty thousand children roamed 
the streets for whom there was no room in 
the schools, and the only defense of the 
School Commissioners was that they " did n't 
know" there were so many; and when we 
mixed truants and thieves in a jail with en- 
tire unconcern. Indeed, the jail filled the 
title role in the educational cast of that day. 
Its inmates were well lodged and cared for, 
while the sanitary authorities twice con- 
demned the Essex Market school across the 
way as wholly unfit for children to be in, 
but failed to catch the ear of the politician 
who ran things unhindered. When (in 
1894) I denounced the " system " of enfor- 
cing — or not enforcing — the compulsory 
education law as a device to make thieves 
out of our children by turning over their 
training to the street, he protested angrily ; 
but the experts of the Tenement House Com- 
mittee found the charge fully borne out by 
the facts. They were certainly plain enough 
in the sight of us all, had we chosen to see! 

When at last we saw, we gave the politi- 
cian a vacation for a season. To say that he 
was to blame for all the mischief would not 



208 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

be fair. We were to blame for leaving him in 
possession. He was only a link in the chain 
which our indifference had forged ; but he 
was always and everywhere an obstruction to 
betterment, -sometimes, iUogically, in spite 
of himself. Successive Tammany mayors 
had taken a stand for the pubHc schools, 
when it was clear that reform could not be 
delayed much longer ; but they were helpless 
against a system of selfishness and stupidity 
of which they were the creatures, though 
they posed as its masters. They had to go 
with it as unfit, and upon the wave that 
swept out the last of the rubbish came re- 
form. The Committee of Seventy took hold, 
the Good Government Clubs, the Tenement 
House Committee, and the women of New 
York. Five years we strove with the powers 
of darkness, and look now at the change. 
The New York school system is not yet the 
ideal one, — it may never be ; but the jail, 
at least, has been cast out of the firm. We 
have a compulsory education law under 
which it will be possible, when a seat has 
been provided for every child, to punish the 
parent for the boy's truancy, unless he sur- 
renders him as unmanageable; and we can 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 209 

count the months now till every child shall 
find the latchstring out on the school door. 
We have had to put our hands deep into 
our pockets to get to that point, but we are 
nearly there now. Since 1895 the expendi- 
tore of twenty-two and a half millions of 
dollars for new schools in the old city has 
been authorized by law, and two thirds of 
the money has been spent. Fifty-odd new 
buildings have been put up, or are going up 
while I am writing, every one of them with 
its playground, which will by and by be free 
to all the neighborhood. The idea is at last 
working through that the schools belong to 
the people, and are primarily for the children 
and their parents ; not mere vehicles of ward 
patronage, or for keeping an army of teach- 
ers in office and pay. 

The silly old regime is dead. The ward 
trustee is gone with his friend the alderman, 
loudly proclaiming the collapse of our Kber- 
ties in the day that saw the schools taken 
from "the people's" control. They were 
"the people." Experts manage our chil- 
dren's education, which was supposed in the 
old plan to be the only thing that did not 
require any training. To superintend a 



210 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

brickyard demanded some knowledge, but 
anybody could run the public schools. It 
cost us an election to take that step. One 
of the Tammany district leaders, who knew 
what he was talking about, said to me after 
it was all over: "I knew we would win. 
Your bringing those foreigners here did the 
business. Our people believe in home rule. 
We kept account of the teachers you brought 
from out of town, and who spent the money 
they made here out of town, and it got to 
be the talk among the tenement people in 
my ward that their daughters would have no 
more show to get to be teachers. That did 
the business. We figured the school vote in 
the city at forty-two thousand, and I knew 
we could not lose." The " foreigners " were 
teachers from Massachusetts and other States, 
who had achieved a national reputation at 
their work. 

There lies upon my table a copy of the 
minutes of the Board of Education of Jan- 
uary 9, 1895, in which is underscored a 
report on a primary school in the Bronx. 
^' It is a wooden shanty," is the inspector's 
account, " heated by stoves, and is a regular 
tinder box j cellar wet, and under one class- 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 211 

room only. This building was erected in 
order, I believe, to determine whether or not 
there was a school population in the neigh- 
borhood to warrant the purchase of property 
to erect a school on." 

That was the way then of taking a school 
census, and the result was the utter failure 
of the compulsory education law to compel 
anything. To-day we have a biennial cen- 
sus, ordained by law, which, when at last it 
gets into the Ld, of »me one who can 
count, will tell us how many Jacob Beres- 
heims are driftmg upon the shoals of the 
street. And we have a truant school to 
keep them safe in. To it, says the kw, no 
thief shall be committed. It is not yet five 
years since the burglar and the truant — 
who, having been rLsed admission to the 
school because there was not room for him, 
inconsequently was locked up for contract- 
ing idle ways — were herded in the Juvenile 
Asylum, and classified there in squads of 
those who were four feet, four feet seven, 
and over four feet seven! I am afraid I 
scandalized some good people, during the 
fight for decency in this matter, by insisting 
that it ought to be considered a good mark 



212 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

for Jacob that he despised such schools as 
were provided for him. But it was true. 
Except for the risk of the burglar, the jail 
was preferable by far. A woman has now 
had charge of the truant school for fourteen 
months, and she tells me that of quite 
twenty-five hundred boys scarce sixty were 
rightly called incorrigible, and even these a 
Uttle longer and tighter grip would probably 
win over. For such, a farm school is yet to 
be provided. The rest responded promptly 
to an appeal to their pride. She " made it 
a personal matter " with each of them, and 
the truant vanished ; the boy was restored. 
The burglar, too, made it a personal matter 
in the old contact, and the result was two 
burglars for one. In common with nearly 
all those who have paid attention to this 
matter, Mrs. Alger beHeves that the truant 
school strikes at the root of the problem of 
juvenile crime. After thirty years of close 
acquaintance with the child population of 
London, Mr. Andrew Drew, chairman of 
the Industrial Committee of the School 
Board, declared his conviction that ^' truancy 
is to be credited with nearly the whole of 
our juvenile criminality." But for years 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 213 

there seemed to be no way of convincing 
the New York School Board that the two 
had anything to do with each other. As 
executive officer of the Good Government 
Clubs, I fought that fight to a finish. We 
got the school, and in Mrs. Alger, at the 
time a truant officer, a person singularly well 
qualified to take charge of it. She has re- 
cently been removed, that her place might be 
given to a man. It is the old scheme come 
back, — a voter behind the broom, — and the 
old slough waiting to overwhelm us again. 

But it will not get the chance. I have 
my own idea of how this truancy question is 
going to be solved. Yesterday I went with 
Superintendent Snyder through some of the 
new schools he is building, upon what he 
calls the letter H plan, in the crowded dis- 
tricts. It is the plan of the Hotel de Cluny 
in Paris, and to my mind as nearly perfect 
as it is possible to make a schoolhouse. There 
is not a dark corner in the whole structure, 
from the splendid gymnasium under the red* 
tiled roof to the indoor playground on the 
ground floor, which, when thrown in one 
with the two open-air playgrounds that lie 
embraced in the arms of the H, will give the 



214 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

children nearly an acre of asphalted floor 
space from street to street, to romp on. 
Seven such schools are going up to-day, each 
a beautiful palace, and within the year six- 
teen thousand children will be housed in 
them. When I think of the old Allen Street 
school, where the gas had to be kept burn- 
ing even on the brightest days, recitations 
suspended every half hour, and the chil- 
dren made to practice calisthenics so that 
they should not catch cold while the win- 
dows were opened to let in fresh air ; of the 
dark playground downstairs, with the rats 
keeping up such a racket that one could 
hardly hear himself speak at times, or of the 
other East Side playground where the boys 
^^were n't allowed to speak above a whis- 
per," so as not to disturb those studying 
overhead, I fancy that I can make out both 
the cause and the cure of the boy's despera- 
tion. " We try to make our schools pleasant 
enough to hold the children," wrote the 
Superintendent of Schools in Indianapolis to 
me once, and added that they had no truant 
problem worth bothering about. With the 
kindergarten and manual training firmly en- 
grafted upon the school course, as they are 



• •• 
■ • 

• ••' 



^••« 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 216 

at last, and with it reaching out to enlist 
also the boy's play through playground and 
vacation schools, I shall be willing to turn 
the boy, who will not come in, over to the 
reformatory. They will not need to build a 
new wing to the jail for his safe-keeping. 

All ways lead to Rome. The reform in 
school-building dates back, as does every 
other reform in New York, to the Mulberry 
Bend. It began there. The first school 
that departed from the soulless old tradition, 
to set beautiful pictures before the child's 
mind as well as dry figures on the slate, was 
built there. At the time I wanted it to 
stand in the park, hoping so to hasten the 
laying out of that ; but although the Small 
Parks law expressly permitted the erection 
on park property of buildings for "the 
instruction of the people," the officials upon 
whom I pressed my scheme could not.be 
made to understand that as including schools. 
Perhaps they were right. I catechised thirty- 
one Fourth Ward girls in a sewing school, 
about that time, twenty-six of whom had 
attended the public schools of the district 
more than a year. One wore a badge earned 
for excellence in her studies. In those days 



216 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

every street comer was pWded with big 
posters of Napoleon on a white horse riding 
through fire and smoke. There was one 
right across the street. Yet only one of the 
thirty-one knew who Napoleon was. She 
^^ thought she had heard of the gentleman 
before." It came out that the one impres- 
sion she retained of what she had heard was 
that " the gentleman " had two wives. They 
knew of Washington that he was the first 
President of the United States, and cut down 
a cherry-tree. They were sitting and sewing 
at the time almost on the identical spot 
where he lived and held ofi&ce. To the ques- 
tion who ruled before Washington the an- 
swer came promptly: no one; he was the 
first. They agreed reluctantly, upon further 
consideration, that there was probably "a 
King of America " before his day, and the 
Irish damsels turned up their noses at the 
idea. The people of Canada, they thought, 
were copper-colored. The same winter I 
was indignantly bidden to depart from a 
school in the Fourth Ward by a trustee 
who had heard that I had written a book 
about the slum and spoken of ^^ his people " 
in it. 



JUSTICE FOB^HE BOY 217 

Those early steps in the ref onn path stum- 
bled sadly at times over obstacles that showed 
how dense was the ignorance and how rank 
were the prejudices we had to fight. When 
I wrote that the Allen Street school was 
overrun by rats, which was a fact any one 
might observe for himself by spending five 
minutes in the building, I was called sharply 
to account by the Mayor in the Board of 
Estimate and Apportionment. There were 
no rats, he said. The Allen Street school 
was the worst of them all, and I determined 
that the time had come to make a demon- 
stration. I procured a rat trap, and was 
waiting for an idle hour to go over and 
catch one of the rats, so that I might have 
it stuffed and sent to the board over which 
the Mayor presided, as a convincing exhibit ; 
but before I got so far reform swept the 
whole conspiracy of ignorance and jobbery 
out of the City Hall. 

That was well enough as far as it went ; 
but that the broom was needed elsewhere we 
learned later, when the Good Government 
Clubs fought for the inspection of the 
schools and of the children by trained ocu- 
lists. The evidence was that the pupils 



218 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

were made both near-sighted and stupid by 
the want of proper arrangement of their 
seats and of themselves in the class-room. 
The fact was not denied, and the scheme 
was strongly indorsed by the Board of 
Health and by some of the ablest and best 
known oculists in the city; but it was 
wrecked upon an opposition in which we 
heard the ignorant and selfish cry that it 
would " interfere with private practice," and 
so curtail the profits of the practitioner. The 
proposal to inspect the classes daily for evi- 
dence of contagious disease — which, carried 
out, has proved a most effective means of pre- 
venting the spread of epidemics, and one of 
the greatest blessings — had been opposed, 
happily unsuccessfully, with the same argu- 
ments.^ It is very well to prate about the 
rapacity of politicians, but these things came 
often enough to show what they meant by 

^ I set down reluctantly this censare of an honored pro- 
fession, to individual members of which I have been wont, 
in a long succession of troubled years, to go for advice and 
help in public matters, and never in vain. The statement 
of the chief sanitary officer of the Health Department, 
reaffirmed at the time I am writing, is, however, positive 
to the effect that to this opposition, and this only, was dae 
the failure of that much-needed reform which had for 
years been with me a pet measure. 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 219 

the claim that they were ^^ closer to the peo- 
ple " than we who were trying to help them ; 
and they were all the more exasperating be- 
cause they came rarely from below, — the 
tenement people, when they were not delib- 
erately misled, were ready and eager to fall 
in with any plan for bettering things, nota- 
bly where it concerned the schools, — but 
usually from those who knew better, and 
from whom we had a right to expect support 
and backing. 

Speaking of that reminds me of a mishap 
I had in the Hester Street school, — the one 
with the " f riUs " which the Board of Edu- 
cation cut off. I happened to pass it after 
school hours, and went in to see what sort 
of a playground the roof would have made. 
I met no one on the way, and, finding the 
scuttle open, climbed out and up the slant 
of the roof to the peak, where I sat musing 
over our lost chance, when the janitor came 
to close up. He must have thought I was a 
crazy man, and my explanation did not make 
it any better. He haled me down, and but 
for the fortunate chance that the policeman 
on the beat knew me, I should have been 
taken to the lockup as a dangerous lunatic, 



220 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

-aU for dreaming of a playground on the 
roof of a schoolhouse. 

Janitor and Board of Commissioners to 
the contrary notwithstanding, the dream be- 
came real. There stands another school in 
Hester Street to-day within easy call, that 
has a playground measuring more than 
twelve thousand square feet on the roof, one 
of half that size down on the ground, and 
an asphalted indoor playground as hig as 
the one on the roof. Together they mea- 
sure a trifle less than thirty thousand feet. 
To the indignant amazement of my captor, 
the janitor, his school was thrown open to the 
children in the last summer vacation, and in 
the winter they put a boys' club in to worry 
him. What further indignities there are in 
store for him, in this day of " frills," there 
is no telling. A resolution is on record 
which states, under date of May 18, 1897, 
that " it is the sense of the Board of Super- 
intendents that the schoolhouses may well 
be used in the cause of education as neigh- 
borhood centres, providing reading-rooms, 
branch offices of public Ubraries, etc." And 
to cut off all chance of relapse into the old 
doubt whether " such things are educa- 



• f 



I 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 221 

tional/' that laid so many o£ our hopes on 
the dusty shelf of the ciafoumlocution office, 
the state legislature has expressly declared 
that the commonwealth will take the chance, 
which Boards of Education shunned, of a 
little amusement creeping in. The schools 
may be used for "purposes of recreation." 
To the janitor it must seem that the end of 
all things is at hand. 

In the crowded districts, the school play- 
grounds were thrown open to the children 
during the long vacation last year, with kin- 
dergarten teachers to amuse them, and half 
a score of vacation schools tempted more 
than four thousand children from the street 
into the cool shade of the class-rooms. They 
wrought in wood and iron, they sang and 
they played and studied nature, — out of a 
barrel, to be sure, that came twice a week 
from Long Island filled with "specimens;" 
but toward the end we took a hint from 
Chicago, and let the children gather their 
own specimens on excursions around the bay 
and suburbs of the city. That was a tre- 
mendous success. The mere hint that money 
might be lacking to pay for the excursions 
this summer set the St. Andrew's Brother- 



222 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

hood men on Long Island to devising 
schemes for inviting the schoolchildren out 
on trolley and shore trips. With the Chris- 
tian Endeavor^ the Epworth League^ and 
kindred societies looking about for some- 
thing to try their young strength and enthu- 
siasm on, we may be here standing upon the 
threshold of something which shall bring us 
nearer to a universal brotherhood than all 
the consecrations and badges that have yet 
been invented. 

The mere contact with nature, even out of 
a barrel, brought something to those starved 
child lives that struck a new note. Some- 
times it rang with a sharp and jarring sound. 
The boys in the Hester Street school could 
not be made to take an interest in the lesson 
on wheat until the teacher came to the 
effect of drought and a bad year on the 
farmer's pocket. Then they understood. 
They knew the process. Strikes cut into the 
earnings of Hester Street, smaU enough at 
the best of times, at frequent intervals, and 
the boys need not be told what a bad year 
means. No other kind ever occurs there. 
They learned the lesson on wheat in no time, 
after that. Oftener it was a gentler note 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 223 

that piped timidly in the strange place. A 
barrel of wild roses came one day, instead of 
the expected "specimens," and these were 
given to the children. They took them 
greedily. "I wondered," said the teacher, 
"if it was more love of the flower, or of 
getting something for nothing, no matter 
what." But even if it were largely the lat- 
ter, there was still the rose. Nothing like 
it had come that way before, and without a 
doubt it taught its own lesson. The Italian 
child might have jumped for it more eagerly, 
but its beauty was not wasted in Jew-town, 
either. The baby kissed it, and it lay upon 
more than one wan cheek, and whispered 
who knows what thought of hope and cour- 
age that were nearly gone. Even in Hester 
Street the wild rose from the hedge was not 
wasted. 

The result of it all was wholesome and 
good, because it was common sense. The 
way to fight the slum in the children's lives 
is with sunlight and flowers and play, which 
their child hearts crave, if their eyes have 
never seen them. The teachers reported that 
the boys were easier to manage, more quiet, 
and played more fairly than before. The 



224 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

police reports showed that fewer were ar- 
rested or run over in the streets than in 
other years. A worse enemy was attacked 
than the trolley car or the truck. In the 
kindergarten at the Hull House in Chicago 
there hangs a picture of a harvest scene^ 
with the man wiping his brow, and a woman 
resting at his feet. The teacher told me that 
a little girl with an old face picked it out 
among all the rest, and considered it long 
and gravely. ' " Well," she said, when her 
inspection was finished, ^^he knocked her 
down, did n't he ? " A two hours' argument 
for kindergartei^s or vacation schools could 
not have put it stronger or better. 

The awakening of the civic conscience is 
nowhere more plainly traced than in our 
public schools. The last five years have set 
us fifty years ahead, and there is now no 
doubling on the track we have struck. We 
have fifty kindergartens to-day where five 
years ago we had one, and their method has 
invaded the whole system of teaching. Cook- 
ing, the only kind of temperance preaching 
that counts for anything in a school course, 
is taught in the girls' classes. Five years 
ago a minister of justice declared in the 



JUSTICE FOB THE BOY 225 

Belgian Chamber that the nation was revert- 
ing to a new form of barbarism^ which he 
described by the term " alcoholic barbarism," 
and pointed out as its first cause the ^^ insuf- 
ficiency of the food procurable by the work- 
ing classes." He referred to the quality, not 
the quantity. The United States experts, 
who lately made a study of the living habits 
of the poor in New York, spoke of it as a 
common observation that '' a not inconsider- 
able amount of the prevalent intemperance 
can be traced to poor food and unattractive 
home tables." The toasting-fork in Jacob's 
sister's hand beats preaching in the campaign 
against the saloon, just as the boys' club 
beats the police club in fighting the gang. 

The cram and the jam are being crowded 
out as common-sense teaching steps in and 
takes their place, and the ^^ three H's," the 
head, the heart, and the hand, — a whole 
boy, — are taking the place too long mo- 
nopolized by the "three R's." There was 
need of it. It had seemed sometimes as if, 
in our anxiety lest he should not get enough, 
we were in danger of stuffing the boy to 
the point of making a hopeless dunce of 
him. It is a higher function of the school to 



226 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

teach principles than to impart facte merely. 
Teaching the hoy municipal politics and a 
thousand things to make a good citizen of 
him, instead of so filling him with love of 
his counfary and pride in ite teaditions that 
he is bound to take the right stand when the 
time comes, is as though one were to attempt 
to put all the law of the state into its con- 
stitution to make it more binding. The 
result would be hopeless congestion and 
general uselessness. 

It comes down to the teacher in the end, 
and there are 5600 of them in the old city 
alone, 10,000 for the greater city ; ^ the great 
mass faithful and zealous, but yoked to the 
traditions of a day that is past. Half the 
machine teaching, the wooden output of our 
public schools in the past, I believe was due 
to the practical isolation of the teachers be- 
tween the tyranny of poUtics and the distrust 
of those who had good cause to fear the 
politician and his work. There was never a 
more saddening sight than that of the teach- 
ers standing together in an ahnost soUd body 

^ The exact number for April, 1899, was 9989 ; nmnber 
of pupils registered, 401,761 ; average daily attendance, 
370,722. 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOT 227 

to resist reform of the school system as an 
attack upon them. There was no pretense 
on their part that the schools did not need 
reform. They knew better. They fought 
for their places. Throughout the fight no 
word came from them of the children's 
rights. They imagined that theirs were in 
danger, and they had no thought for any- 
thing else. We gathered then the ripe fruit 
of politics, and it will be a long while, I 
suppose, before we get the taste out of our 
mouths. But the grip of poUtics on our 
schools has been loosened, if not shaken off 
altogether, and the teacher's slavery is at an 
end, if she herself so wills it. Once hardly 
thought worthy of a day laborer's hire, she 
will receive a policeman's pay for faithful 
service^ in the school year now begun, with 
his privilege of a half-pay pension on retire- 
ment. Within three weeks after the pas- 
sage of the salary bill f oriy-two teachers in 
the borou£:hs of Manhattan and Bronx had 
appHed Jretir^^ent. The training sotoob 
are hard at work filling up the gaps. The 
windows of the schoolhouse have been 

^ The teacher's pay, under the new act, is from $600 to 
81400. The policeman's pay is 81400. 



228 A TEN YEABS' WAB 

thrown open^ and life let in there too with 
the sunlight. The day may he not far dis- 
tant when ours shall he schools ^^for dis- 
covering aptitude," in Professor Felix Adler's 
wise plan. The prohlem is a vast one, even 
in its hulk ; every year seats must he found 
on the school henches for twenty thousand 
additional children. However deep we have 
gone down into our pockets to pay for new 
schools, there are to-day in the greater ciiy 
nearly thirty thousand chUdren in half-day or 
part-tune classes, waiting their chance. But 
that it can and will he solved the experience 
of the last five years fully warrants. 

In the solution the women of New York 
will have had no mean share. In the 
struggle for school reform they struck the 
telling blows, and the credit for the victory 
was justly theirs. The Public Education 
Association, originally a woman's auxiliary 
to Good Government Club E, has since 
worked as energetically with the school au- 
thorities as it before worked against them. 
It has opened many windows for little souls 
by hanging schoolrooms with beautiful casts 
and pictures, and forged at the same time 
new and strong links in the chain that bound 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 229 

the boy all too feebly to the school. At a 
time when the demand of the boys of the 
East Side for club room^ which was in itself 
one of the healthiest signs of the day, had 
reached an exceedingly dangerous pass, the 
Public Education Association broke ground 
that will prove the most fertile field of all. 
The Baines law saloon, quick to discern in 
the new demand the gap that would divorce 
it by and by from the man, attempted to 
bridge it by inviting the boy in under its 
roof. Occasionally the girl went along. A 
typical instance of how the scheme worked 
was brought to my attention at the time by 
the manager of the College Settlement. The 
back room of the saloon was given to the 
club free of charge, with the understanding 
that the boy members should '^ treat." As a 
means of raising the needed funds, the club 
hit upon the plan of fining members ten 
cents when they " got funny." To defeat 
this device of the devil some way must be 
found ; but club room was scarce among the 
tenements. The Good Government Clubs 
proposed to the Board of Education that it 
open the empty class-rooms at night for 
the children's use. It was my privilege to 



230 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

plead their cause before the School Board, 
and to obtain from it the necessary permis- 
sion, after some hesitation and doubt as to 
whether " it was educational." The Public 
Education Association promptly assumed the 
responsibiUty for "the property," and the 
Hester Street school was opened. There are 
now two schools that are given over to even- 
ing clubs. The property has not been 
molested, but the boys who have met under 
Miss Winifred Buck's management have 
learned many a lesson of self-control and 
practical wisdom that has proved "educa- 
tional " in the highest degree. Her plan is 
simplicity itself. Through their play — the 
meeting usually begins with a romp — in quar- 
ters where there is not too much elbow-room, 
the boys learn the first lesson of respecting 
one another's rights. The subsequent busi- 
ness meeting puts them upon the funda- 
mentals of civilized society, as it were. Out 
of the debate of the question, Do we want 
boys who swear, steal, gamble, and smoke 
cigarettes ? grow convictions as to why these 
vices are wrong that put " the gang " in its 
proper light. Punishment comes to appear, 
when administered by the boys themselves, a 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 231 

natural consequence of law-breaking, in de- 
fense of society; and the boy is won. He 
can thenceforward be trusted to work out 
his own salvation. If he does it occasionally 
with excessive unction, remember how recent 
is his conversion. " Mesolved, that wisdom 
is better than wealth," was rejected as a 
topic for discussion by one of the clubs, be- 
cause " everybody knows it is." This was in 
the Tenth Ward. If temptation had come 
that way in the shape of a pushcart with 
pineapples — we are all human ! Anyway, 
they had learned the right. 

With the women to lead, the school has 
even turned the tables on the jail and in- 
vaded it bodily. For now nearly two years 
the Public Education Association has kept 
school in the Tombs, for the boys locked up 
there awaiting trial. Of thirty-one pupils on 
this school register, the other day, twelve 
were charged with burglary, four with high- 
way robbery, and three with murder. That 
was the gang run to earth at last. . Better 
late than never. The windows of their prison 
overlooked the spot where the gallows used 
to stand that cut short many a career such 
as they pursued. They were soberly atten- 



232 A TEN YEARS' WAE 

tive to their studies, which were of a severely 
practical turn. Their teacher, Mr. David 
WiUard, who was a resident of the Univer- 
sity Settlement in its old Delancey Street 
home, — the fact that the forces for good 
one finds at work in the slum usually lead 
back to the settlements shows best that they 
have so far escaped the peril of stiffening 
into mere institutions, — has his own sound 
view of how to head off the hangman. Daily 
and nightly he gathers about him in the 
house on Chrystie Street, where he makes his 
home, three hundred boys and girls, whom 
he meets as their frien^, on equal terms. 
The club is the means of getting them there, 
and so it is in its right place. 

Once a week another teacher comes to the 
Tombs school, and tells the boys of our city's 
history, its famous building^ and great men ; 
trying so to arouse their interest as a first 
step toward a citizen's pride. This one also 
is sent by a club of women, the City History 
Club, which in three years has done strange 
things among the children. It sprang from 
the proposition of Mr. Robert Abbe that the 
man and the citizen has his birth in the boy, 
and that to love a thing one must know it 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 233 

first. The half-dozen classes that were started 
for the study of our city's history have sweUed 
into nearly a hundred, with quite eighteen 
hundred pupils. The pregnant fact was 
noted early by the teachers, that the immi- 
grant boy easily outstrips in interest for his 
adopted home the native, who perchance 
turns up his nose at him, and later very 
Kkely complains of the " unscrupulousness " 
of the Jew who forged ahead of him in busi- 
ness as well. 

"Everything takes ten years." Looking 
back from the closing year of the century, 
one is almost tempted to turn Mr. Hewitt's 
phrase about, and say that everything has 
been packed into ten years. The tenth 
winter of the free lectures, which the city 
provides to fill up in a measure those gaps 
which the earlier years left, has just passed. 
When the first course showed an attendance 
of 22,149 upon 186 lectures, we were all 
encouraged; but the last season saw 1923 
lectures delivered upon every topic of human 
interest, from the care of our bodies and 
natural science to literature, astronomy, and 
music, and a multitude of 519,411 persons, 
chiefly workingmen and their wives, the 



/ 



234 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

parents of the schoolboy, heard them. Forty- 
eight schools and halls were employed for 
the purpose. The People's Institute adds to 
this programme a forum for the discussion 
of social topics, nineteenth-century history, 
and " present problems " on a wholly non-par- 
tisan, unsectarian basis. The Institute was 
launched upon its educational mission within 
six weeks after the disastrous Greater New 
York election in 1897. It has since drawn 
to the platform of the Cooper Institute audi- 
ences, chiefly of workingmen more or less 
connected with the labor movement, that 
have fiUed its great hall. The spirit that 
animates its work is shown in its review of 
the field upon the threshold of its third year. 
Speaking of the social issues that are hasten- 
ing toward a settlement, it says : " Society is 
about to be organized, gradually, wisely, on 
the lines of the recognition of the brother- 
hood of man. The People's Institute holds 
to-day, as no other institution in this city, 
the confidence of all classes of the working 
people ; also of the best minds among the 
well-to-do classes. It can throw all its in- 
fluence upon the side of removing misunder- 
standings, promoting mutual confidence. . . . 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 235 

This is its great work." A great undertak- 
ing, truly, but one in which no one may 
rashly say it shall not succeed. As an in- 
stallment, it organized last spring, for study, 
discussion, and social intercourse, the first of 
a chain of People's Clubs, full of a strong 
and stirring hfe, which within three months 
had a membership of three hundred and 
fifty, and a list of two hundred and fifty 
applicants. 

While the Institute's plan has met with 
this cordial reception downtown, uptown, 
among the leisure classes, its acceptance has 
been nothing like so ready. Selfish wealth 
has turned a cold shoulder to the brother- 
hood of man, as so often in the past. Still 
the proffered hand is not withdrawn. In 
a hundred ways it is held out with tender 
of help and sympathy and friendship, these 
days, where distrust and indifference were 
once the rule. The People's University Ex- 
tension Society, leaving the platform to its 
allies, invades the home, the nursery, the 
kindergarten, the club, wherever it can, with 
help and counsel. Down on the lower East 
Side, the Educational Alliance conducts from 
the Hebrew Institute an energetic campaign 



236 A TEN YEARS* WAR 

among the Jewish immigrante that reaches 
fully six thousand souls^ two thirds of them 
children^ every day in the week. Sixty-two 
clubs alone hold meetings in the building 
on Saturday and Sunday. Under the same 
roof the Baron Hirsch Fund has taught six- 
teen thousand chUdren of refugee Jews in 
nine years. It passes them on to the pub- 
lic schools within six months of their land- 
ing, the best material they receive from 
anywhere. 

So the boy is being got ready for deal- 
ing, in the years that are to come, with the 
other but not more difficult problems of set- 
ting his house to rights, and ridding it of 
the political gang which now misrepresents 
him and us. And justice to Jacob is being 
evolved. Not yet without obstruction and 
dragging of feet. The excellent home library 
plan that proved so wholesome in the poor 
quarters of Boston has failed in New York, 
except in a few notable instances, through 
the difficulty of securing the visitors upon 
whom the plan depends for its success. The 
same want has kept the boys' club from reach- 
ing the development that would apply the 
real test to it as a barrier against the slum. 



JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 237 

There are fifteen clubs for every Winifred 
Buck that is in sight. From the City Efis- 
tory Club, the Charity Organization Society, 
from everywhere, comes the same complaint. 
The hardest thing in the world to give is 
still one's self. But it is all the time getting 
to be easier. There are daily more women 
and men who, thinking of the boy, can say, 
and do, with my friend of the College Settle- 
ment, when an opportunity to enter a larger 
field was offered her, " No, I am content to 
stay here, to be ready for Johnnie when he 
wants me." 

Justice for the boy, and for his father. 
An itinerant Jewish glazier, crying his wares, 
was beckoned into a stable by the foreman, 
and bidden to replace a lot of broken panes, 
enough nearly to exhaust his stock. When, 
after working half the day, he asked for his 
pay, he was driven from the place with jeers 
and vile words. Raging and impotent, he 
went back to his poor tenement cursing a 
world in which there was no justice for a 
poor man. If he had next been found rant- 
ing with anarchists against the social order, 
would you have blamed him ? He found in- 
stead, in the Legal Aid Society, a champion 



238 A TEN YEARS* WAR 

that pleaded his cause and compelled the 
stableman to pay him his wages. For a hun- 
dred thousand such — more shame to us — 
this society has meant all that freedom pro- 
mised : justice to the poor man. It too has 
earned a place among the forces that are 
working out through the new education the 
brighter day^ for it has taught the lesson 
which all the citizens of a free state need 
most to learn^ — respect for law. 



vm 

REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 

I HAVE sketched in outline the gains 
achieved in the metropolis since its con- 
science awoke. Now, in closing this ac- 
count, I am reminded of the story of an old 
Irishman who died here a couple of years 
ago. Patrick Mullen was an honest black- 
smith. He made guns for a living. He 
made them so well that one with his name 
on it was worth a good deal more than the 
market price of guns. Other makers went 
to him with offers of money for the use of 
his stamp; but they never went twice. 
When sometimes a gun of very superior 
make was brought to him to finish, he would 
stamp it P. Mullen, never Patrick Mullen. 
Only to that which he himself had wrought 
did he give his honest name without reserve. 
When he died, judges and bishops and other 
great men crowded to his modest home by 
the East River, and wrote letters to the 



240 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

newspapers telling how proud they had been 
to call him friend. Tet he was, and re- 
mained to the end, plain Patrick Mullen, 
blacksmith and gunmaker. 

In his life he supplied the answer to the 
sigh of dreamers in all days : when will the 
millennium come ? It will come when every 
man is a Patrick Mullen at his own trade; 
not merely a P. Mullen, but a Patrick Mul- 
len. The millennium of municipal poUtics, 
when there shall be no slum to fight, will 
come when every citizen does his whole duty 
as a citizen; not before. As long as he 
^^ despises politics," and deputizes another to 
do it for him, whether that other wears the 
stamp of a Croker or of a Piatt, — it matters 
little which, — we shall have the slum, and 
be put periodically to the trouble and the 
shame of draining it in the public sight. A 
citizen's duty is one thing that cannot be 
farmed out safely ; and the slum is not lim- 
ited by the rookeries of Mulberry or Ludlow 
streets. It has long roots that feed on the 
selfishness and dullness of Fifth Avenue 
quite as greedily as on the squalor of the 
Sixth Ward. The two are not nearly so far 
apart as they look. 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 241 

I am not saying this because it is any- 
thing new, but because we have just had an 
illustration of its truth in municipal politics. 
Waring and Roosevelt were the Patrick 
Mullens of the reform administration which 
Tammany has now replaced with her inso- 
lent platform, "To hell with reform." It 
was not an ideal administration, but it can 
be said of it, at least, that it was up to the 
times it served. It made compromises with 
spoils politics, and they were wretched fail- 
ures. It took Waring and Roosevelt on the 
other plan, on which they insisted, of di- 
vorcing politics from the public business, 
and they let in more light than even my 
small parks over on the East Side. For 
they showed us where we stood and what 
was the matter with us. We believed in 
Waring when he demonsixated the success 
of his plan for cleaning the streets : not be- 
fore. When Roosevelt announced his pro- 
gramme of enforcing the excise law because 
it was law, a howl arose that would have 
frightened a less resolute man from his pur- 
pose. But he went right on doing the duty 
he was sworn to do. And when, at the end 
of three months of clamor and abuse, we 



242 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

saw the spectacle of the saloon keepers for- 
mally resolving to help the police instead 
of hindering them ; of the prison ward in 
Bellevue Hospital standing empty for three 
days at a time, an astonishing and unprece- 
dented thing, which the warden could only 
attribute to the " prompt closing of the sa- 
loons at one a. m. ; " and of the police force 
recovering its lost self-respect, we had found 
out more and greater things than whether 
the excise law was a good or a bad law. 
We understood what Roosevelt meant when 
he insisted upon the "primary virtues" of 
honesty and courage in the conduct of pub- 
lic business. For the want of them in us, 
half the laws that touched our daily lives had 
become dead letters or vehicles of blackmail 
and oppression. It was worth something to 
have that lesson taught us in that way ; to 
find out that simple, straightforward, honest 
dealing as between man and man is after all 
effective in politics as in gunmaking. Per- 
haps we have not mastered the lesson yet. 
But we have not discharged the teacher, 
either. 

Courage, indeed ! There were times dur- 
ing that stormy spell when it seemed as if 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 243 

we had grown wholly and hopelessly flabby 
as a people. All the outcry against the 
programme of order did not come from the 
lawless and the disorderly, by any means. 
Ordinarily decent, conservative citizens 
joined in counseling moderation and virtual 
compromise with the law-breakers — it was 
nothing else — to "avoid trouble." The 
old love of fair play had been whittled down 
by the jackknife of all-pervading expediency 
to an anaemic desire to "hold the scales 
even ; " that is a favorite modern device of 
the devil for paralyzing action in men. You 
cannot hold the scales even in a moral issue. 
It inevitably results in the triumph of evil, 
which asks nothing better than the even 
chance to which it is not entitled. When 
the trouble in the Police Board had reached 
a point where it seemed impossible not to 
understand that Roosevelt and his side were 
fighting a cold and treacherous conspiracy 
against the cause of good government, we 
had the spectacle of a Christian Endeavor 
Society inviting the man who had hatched 
the plot, the bitter and relentless enemy 
whom the Mayor had summoned to resign, 
and afterward did his best to remove as a 



244 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

fatal obstacle to ref onn, — inviting this man 
to come before it and speak of Christian citi- 
zenship ! It was a sight to make the bosses 
hug themselves with glee. For Christian 
citizenship is their nightmare^ and nothing 
is so cheering to them as evidence that those 
who profess it have no sense. 

Apart from the moral bearings of it^ what 
this question of enforcement of law means 
in the life of the poor was illustrated by tes- 
timony given before the PoKce Board very 
recently. A captain was on trial for allow- 
ing the policy swindle to go unchecked in 
his precinct. PoKcy is a kind of penny lot- 
tery, with alleged daily drawings which 
never take place. The whole thing is a pes- 
tilent fraud, which is allowed to exist only 
because it pays heavy blackmail to the police 
and the politicians. Expert witnesses tes- 
tified that eight policy shops in the Twenty- 
First Ward, which they had visited, did a 
business averaging about thirty-two dollars 
a day each. The Twenty-First is a poor 
Irish tenement ward. The policy sharks 
were getting two hundred and fifty dollars 
or more a day of the hard-earned wages of 
those poor people, in sums of from one and 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 245 

two cents to a quarter, without making any 
return for it. The thing would seem incred- 
ible, were it not too sadly familiar. The 
saloon keeper got his share of what was 
left, and rewarded his customer by posing as 
the " friend of the poor man " whenever his 
business was under scrutiny ; I have yet in 
my office the record of a single week during 
the hottest of the fight between Roosevelt 
and the saloons, as showing of what kind 
that friendship is. It embraces the destruc- 
tion of eight homes by the demon of drunk- 
enness : the suicide of four wives, the mur- 
der of two others by drunken husbands, the 
kilUng of a policeman in the street, and the 
torture of an aged woman by her rascal son, 
who " used to be a good boy till he took to 
liquor, when he became a perfect devil." In 
that role he finally beat her to death for 
giving shelter to some evicted fellow tenants 
who else would have had to sleep in the 
street. Nice friendly turn, was n't it ? 

And yet there was something to be said 
for the saloon keeper. He gave the man the 
refuge from his tenement which he needed. 
I say needed, purposely. There has been a 
good deal of talk lately about the saloon as 



246 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

a social necessity. About all there is to 
that is that the saloon is there, and the 
necessity too. Man is a social animal, 
whether he lives in a tenement or in a pal- 
ace. But the palace has resources; the 
tenement has not. It is a good place to 
get away from at all times. The saloon 
is cheery and bright, and never far away. 
The man cravmg human companionship 
finds it there. He finds, too, in the saloon 
keeper one who understands his wants much 
better than the reformer who talks civil ser- 
vice in the meetings. "Civil service" to 
him and his kind means yet a contrivance 
for keeping them out of a job. The saloon 
keeper knows the boss, if he is not himself 
the boss or his lieutenant, and can steer him 
to the man who will spend all day at the 
City Hall, if need be, to get a job for a 
friend, and all night pulling wires to keep 
him in it, if trouble is brewing. Mr. 
Beecher used to say, when pleading for 
bright hymn tunes, that he did n't want the 
devil to have the monopoly of all the good 
music in the world* The saloon has had 
the monopoly up to date of all the cheer in 
the tenements. If its owner has made it 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 247 

pan out to his own advantage and the boss's^ 
we at least have no just cause of complaint. 
We let him have the field all to himself. 

As to this boss, of whom we hear so much, 
what manner of man is he ? That depends 
on how you look at him. I have one in 
mind, a district boss, whom you would ac- 
cept instantly as a type, if I were to mention 
his name, which I shall not do for a reason 
which I fear will shock you : he and I are 
friends. In his private capacity I have real 
regard for him. As a poUtician and a boss 
I have none at all. I am aware that this is 
taking low ground in a discussion of this 
kind, but perhaps the reader will better 
understand the relations of his "district'' to 
him, if I let him into mine. There is no 
political bond between us, of either district 
or party ; just the reverse. It is purely per- 
sonal. He was once a police justice, — at 
that time he kept a saloon, — and I never 
knew one with more common sense, which 
happens to be the one quality especially 
needed in that office. Up to the point 
where politics came in I could depend upon 
him entirely. At that point he let me know 
bluntly that he was in the habit of running 



248 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

his district to suit himself. The way he did 
it brought him under the just accusation 
of being guilty of every kind of rascality 
known to politics. When next our paths 
would cross each other^ it would very likely 
be on some errand of mercy, to which his 
feet were always swift. I recall the distress 
of a dear and gentle lady at whose dinner 
table I once took his part. She could not 
believe that there was any good in him; 
what he did must be done for effect. Some 
time after that she wrote asking me to look 
after an East Side family that was in gr^at 
trouble. It was during the severe cold spell 
of last winter, and there was need of haste. 
I went over at once; but although I had 
lost no time, I found my friend the boss 
ahead of me. It was a real pleasure to me 
to be able to report to my correspondent 
that he had seen to their comfort, and to 
add that it was unpolitical charity altogether. 
The family was that of a Jewish widow with 
a lot of little children. He is a Roman 
Catholic. There were no men, consequently 
no voters, in the house, which was far out- 
side of his district, too ; and as for effect, he 
was rather shamefaced at my catching him 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 249 

at it. I do not believe that a soul has ever 
heard of the ease from him to this day. 

My friend is a Tammany boss. During 
that same cold spell a politician of the other 
camp came into my oflfice and gave me a hun- 
dred dollars to spend as I saw fit among the 
poor. His district was miles uptown, and 
he was most unwilling to disclose his iden- 
tity, stipulating in the end that no one but 
I should know where the money came from. 
He was not seeking notoriety. The plight 
of the suffering had appealed to him, and he 
wanted to help where he could, that was all. 

Now, I have not the least desire to glorify 
the boss in this. He is not glorious to me. 
He is simply human. Often enough he is 
a coarse and brutal fellow, in his morals as 
in his politics. Again, he may have some 
very engaging personal traits that bind his 
friends to him with the closest of ties. The 
poor man sees the friend, the charity, the 
power that is able and ready to help him 
in need ; is it any wonder that he overlooks 
the source of this power, this plenty, — that 
he forgets the robbery in the robber who is 
" good to the poor " ? Anyhow, if anybody 
got robbed, it was "the rich." With the 



250 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

present ethical standards of the slum^ it is 
easy to construct even a scheme of social 
justice out of it that is very comforting all 
round; even to the boss himself^ though he 
is in need of no sympathy or excuse. ^^ Poli- 
tics," he will tell me in his philosophic moods^ 
^^is a game for profit. The city foots the 
bills." Patriotism means to him working for 
the ticket that shall bring more profit. ^^ I 
regard," he says, lighting his cigar, "a re- 
peater as a shade off a murderer, but you 
L ohUg«l to ad-m. that in n,y trade W U 
a necessary evil." I am not obliged to do 
anything of the kind, but I can understand 
his way of looking at it. He simply has no 
political conscience. He has gratitude, loy- 
alty to a friend, — that is part of his stock 
in trade, — fighting blood, plenty of it, all 
the good qualities of the savage ; nothing 
more. And a savage he is, politically, with 
no soul above the dross. He would not rob 
a neighbor for the world ; but he will steal 
from the city — though he does not call it 
by that name — without a tremor, and count 
it a good mark. When I tell him that, he 
waves his hand toward Wall Street as repre- 
sentative of the business community, and 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 251 

toward the office of his neighbor, the pa- 
drone, as representative of the raikoads, and 
says with a laugh, " Don't they all do it ? " 
The boss believes in himself. It is one 
of his strong points. And he has experience 
to back him. In the fall of 1894 we shook 
off boss rule in New York, and set up house- 
keeping for ourselves. We kept it up three 
years, and then went back to the old style. 
I should judge that we did it because we 
were tired of too much virtue. Perhaps we 
were not built to hold such a lot at once. 
Besides, it is much easier to be ruled than 
to rule. That fall, after the election, when 
I was concerned about what would become 
of my small parks, of the Health Depart- 
ment in which we took such just pride, 
and of a dozen other things, I received one 
unvarying reply to my anxious question, or 
rather two. If it was the Health Depart- 
ment, I was told : " Go to Piatt. He is the 
only man who can do it. He is a sensible 
man, and will see that it is protected." If 
small parks, it was : " Go to Croker. He 
will not allow the work to be stopped." A 
playgrounds bill was to be presented in the 
legislature, and everybody advised : " Go to 



252 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

Piatt. He won't have any objection : it is 
popular." And so on. My advisers were not 
politicians. They were business men, but re- 
cently honestly interested in reform. I was 
talking one day with a gentleman of very 
wide reputation as a philanthropist, about 
the unhappy lot of the old fire-engine horses, 
— which, after Hves of toU that deserve a 
better fate, are sold for a song to drag out 
a weary existence hauling^ some huckster's 
cart aiund,- and ™l4a-t. hey might 
be pensioned off to live out their years on 
a farm, with enough to eat and a chance to 
roll in the grass. He was much interested, 
and promptly gave me this advice : '' I tell 
you what you do. You go and see Croker. 
He likes horses." No wonder the boss be- 
lieves in himself. He would be less than 
human if he did not. And he is very human. 
I had voted on the day of the Greater 
New York election, — the Tammany election, 
as we learned to call it afterward, — in my 
home out in the Borough of Queens, and 
went over to the depot to catch the train 
for the city. On the platform were half a 
dozen of my neighbors, all business men, all 
"friends of reform." Some of them were 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 263 

just down from breakfast. One I remem- 
bered as introducing a resolution, in a meet- 
ing we had held, about the discourtesy of 
local politicians. He looked surprised when 
reminded that it was election day. ** Why, 
is it to-day ? " he said. " They did n't send 
any carriage," said another regretfully. " I 
don't see what 's the use," said the third ; 
**the roads are just as bad as when we began 
talking about it." (We had been trying to 
mend them.) The fourth yawned and said : 
" I don't care. I have my business to attend 
to." And they took the train, which meant 
that they lost their votes. The Tammany 
captain was busy hauling his voters by the 
cartload to the polling place. Over there 
stood a reform candidate who had been 
defeated in the primary, and puffed out his 
chest. " The poKticians are afraid of me," 
he said. They slapped him on the back, as 
they went by, and told him that he was a 
devil of a fellow. 

So Tammany came back. The Health De- 
partment is wrecked. The police force is 
worse than before Roosevelt took hold of it, 
and we are back in the mud out of which we 
pulled ourselves with such an effort. And 



254 A TEN TEARS' WAR 

we are swearing at it. But I am afraid we 
are swearing at the wrong fellow. The real 
Tammany is not the conscienceless rascal 
that plunders our treasury and fattens on 
our substance. That one is a mere counter- 
feit. It is the voter who waits for a car- 
riage to take him to the polls, the man who 
" does n't see what 's the use ; " the busi- 
ness man who says ^^ business is business/' 
and has no time to waste on voting; the 
citizen who "will wait to see how the cat 
jumps, because he does n't want to throw his 
vote away ; " the cowardly American who 
" does n't want to antagonize " anybody ; 
the fool who " washes his hands of politics." 
These are the real Tammany, the men after 
the boss's own heart. For every one whose 
vote he buys, there are two of these. who 
give him theirs for nothing. We shall get 
rid of him when these withdraw their sup- 
port, when they become citizens of the Pat- 
rick Mullen stamp, as faithful at the polling 
place as he was at the forge ; not before. 

The true work of reform is at the top, 
not at the bottom. The man in the slum 
votes according to his light, and the boss 
holds the candle. But the boss is in no real 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 256 

sense a leader. He follows instead, always 
as far behind the moral sentiment of the 
community as he thinks is safe. He has 
heard it said that a community will not be 
any better than its citizens, and that it will 
be just as good as they are, and he applies 
the saying to himself. He is no worse a 
boss than the town deserves. I can conceive 
of his taking credit to himself as some kind 
of a moral instrument by which the virtue 
of the community may be graded, though 
that is most unlikely. He does not bother 
himself with the morals of anything. But 
right here is his Achilles heel. The man 
has no conscience. He cannot tell the signs 
of it in others. It always comes upon him 
unawares. Reform to hiTn simply means the 
" outs '* fighting to get in. The real thing 
he will always underestimate. Such a man 
is not the power he seems. He is formidable 
only in proportion to the amount of shaking 
it takes to rouse the community's conscience. 
The boss is like the measles, a distemper 
of a self-governing people's infancy. When 
we shall have come of age politically, he 
will have no terrors for us. Meanwhile, being 
charged with the business of governing, which 




266 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

we left to him because we were too busy 
making money^ he follows the track laid out 
for him, and makes the business pan out all 
that is in it. He fights when we want to dis- 
charge him. Of course he does. No man 
likes to give up a good job. He will fight or 
bargain, as he sees his way clear. He will give 
us smaU parks, play piers, new schools, any- 
thing we ask, to keep his place, while trying 
to find out " the price " of this conscience 
which he does not understand. Even to the 
half of his kingdom he will give, to be ** in " 
on the new deal. He has done it before, 
and there is no reason that he can see why 
it should not be done again. And he will 
appeal to the people whom he is plundering 
to trust him because they know him. 

Odd as it sounds, this is where he has his 
real hold. I have shown why this is so. To 
the poor people of his district the boss is a 
real friend in need. He is one of them. He 
does not want to reform them ; far from it. 
No doubt it is very ungrateful of them, but 
the poor people have no desire to be re- 
formed. They do not think they need to be. 
They consider their moral standards quite as 
high as those of the rich, and resent being 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 267 

told that they are mistaken. The reformer 
comes to them from another world to tell 
them these things, and goes his way. The 
boss lives among them. He helped John to 
a job on the pipes in their hard winter, and 
got Mike on the force. They know him as a 
good neighbor, and trust him to their harm. 
He drags their standard ever farther down. 
The question for those who are trying to 
help them is how to make them transfer 
their allegiance, and trust their real friends 
instead. 

It ought not to be a difficult question to 
answer. Any teacher could do it. He knows, 
if he knows anything, that the way to get 
and keep the children's confidence is to trust 
them, and let them know that they are trusted. 
They will almost always come up to the 
demand thus made upon them. Preaching 
to them does little good; preaching at them 
still less. Men, whether rich or poor, are 
much like children. The good in them is 
just as good as in the children, and the bad, 
in view of their enlarged opportunities for 
mischief, is not so much worse, all considered. 
A vigorous optimism, a stout belief in one's 
fellow man, is better equipment in a cam- 



268 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

paign for civic virtue than stacks of tracts 
and arguments^ economic and moral^ are. 
There is good bottom, even in the slum, for 
that kind of an anchor to get a grip on. A 
year ago I went to see a boxing match there 
had been much talk about. The hall was 
jammed with a rough and noisy crowd, hotly 
intent upon its favorite. His opponent, who 
hailed, I think, from somewhere in Delaware, 
was greeted with hostile demonstrations as a 
" foreigner." But as the battle wore on, and 
he was seen to be fair and manly, while the 
New Yorker struck one foul blow after an- 
other, the attitude of the crowd changed rap- 
idly from enthusiastic approval of the favor- 
ite to scorn and contempt ; and in the last 
round, when he knocked the Delawarean over 
with a foul blow, the audience rose in a body 
and yelled to have the fight given to the 
"foreigner," until my blood tingled with 
pride. For the decision would leave it prac- 
tically without a cent. It had staked all it 
had on the New Yorker. " He is a good 
man," I heard on all sides, while the once 
favorite sneaked away without a friend. 
" Good " meant fair and manly to that crowd. 
I thought, as I went to the office the next 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 259 

mornings that it ought to be easy to appeal 
to such a people with measures that were 
fair and just, if we could only get on com- 
mon ground. But the only hint I got from 
my reform paper was an editorial denuncia- 
tion of the brutality of boxing, on the same 
page that had an enthusiastic review of 
the college football season. I do not sup- 
pose it did any harm, for the paper was prob- 
ably not read by one of the men it had set 
out to reform. But suppose it had been, 
how much would it have appealed to them ? 
Exactly the qualities of robust manUness 
which football is supposed to encourage in 
college students had been evoked by the 
trial of strength and skill which they had 
witnessed. As to the brutality, they knew 
that fifty young men are maimed or killed 
at football to one who fairs ill in a boxing 
match. Would it seem to them common 
sense, or cant and humbug ? 

It comes down in the end to a question of 
common sense and common honesty. For 
how many failures of reform effort is insin- 
cerity not to blame ! Last spring I attended 
a meeting at Albany that had been called by 
the governor to discuss the better enforce- 



260 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

ment of the labor laws. We talked the 
situation over, and Mr. Roosevelt received 
from those present their ready promise to aid 
him in every way in making effective the 
laws that represented so much toil and sacri- 
fice, yet had until then been in too many 
instances barren of results. Some time after, 
a workingman told me with scorn how, on 
our coming home, one of our party had 
stopped in at the factory inspector's of&ce 
to urge him to "let up " on a friend, a cigar 
manufacturer, who was violating a law for 
which the labor organizations had fought 
long years as absolutely necessary to secure 
human conditions in the trade. How much 
stock might he and his fellows be supposed 
to take in a movement that had such cham- 
pions? "You scratch my back and I'll 
scratch yours," is a kind of politics in which 
the reformer is no match for the boss. The 
boss will win on that Kne every time. A 
saving sense of humor might have avoided 
that and many other pitfalls. I am seriously 
of the opinion that a professional humorist 
ought to be attached to every reform move- 
ment, to keep it from making itself ridiculous 
by either too great solemnity or too much 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 261 

conceit. As it is, the enemy sometimes em- 
ploys him with effect. Failing the adoption 
of that plan, I would recommend a decree 
of banishment against photographers, press- 
clippings men, and the rest of the congrat- 
ulatory staff. Why should the fact that a 
citizen has done a citizen's duty deserve to 
be celebrated in print and picture, as if 
something extraordinary had happened? 
The smoke of battle had not cleared away 
after the victory of reform, in the fall of 
1894, before the citizens' committee and all 
the little sub-committees rushed pell-mell to 
the photographer's to get themselves on 
record as the men who did it. The spectacle 
might have inspired in the humorist the 
advice to get two sets made, while they were 
about it, — one to serve by and by as an 
exhibit of the men who did n't ; and, as the 
event proved, he would have been right. 

But it is easy to find fault, and on that 
tack we get no farther. Those men did a 
great work, and they did it well. The mile- 
posts they set up on the road to better things 
will guide another generation to the goal, 
however the present may go astray. Good 
schools, better homes, and a chance for the 



262 A TEN Y£ABS' WAR 

boy are arguments that are not lost upon the 
people. They wear well. It may be that, 
like Moses and his followers, we of the 
present day shall see the promised land only 
from afar and with the eye of faith, because 
of our sins ; that to a younger and sturdier 
to-morrow it shall be given to blaze the path 
of civic righteousness that was our dream. 
I like to think that it is so, and that that 
is the meaning of the commg of men like 
Roosevelt and Waring at this time with their 
simple appeal to the reason of honest men. 
Unless I greatly err in reading the signs of 
the times, it is indeed so, and the day of the 
boss and of the slum is drawing to an end. 
Our faith has felt the new impulse ; rather, I 
should say, it has given it. The social move- 
ments, and that which we call poUtics, are 
but a reflection of what the people honestly 
believe, a chart of their aims and aspirations. 
Charity in our day no longer means alms, 
but justice. The social settlements are sub- 
stituting vital touch for the machine charity 
that reaped a crop of hate and beggary. 
They are passenger bridges, it has been truly 
said, not mere " shoots " for the delivery of 
coal and groceries ; bridges upon which men 



I. 

i 
I 



>r« 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 263 

go over, not down, from the mansion to the 
tenement. We have learned that we cannot 
pass off checks for human sympathy in settle- 
ment of our brotherhood arrears. The church, 
which once stood by indifferent, or worse, 
is hastening to enter the life of the people. 
In the memory of men yet living, one church, 
moving uptown away from the crowd, left 
its old Mulberry Street home to be converted 
into tenements that justly earned the name of 
" dens of death " in the Health Department's 
records, while another became the foulest 
lodging house in an unclean city. It was a 
church corporation which in those bad days 
owned the worst underground dive down- 
town, and turned a deaf ear to all remon- 
strances. The church was "anghng for 
souls." But souls in this world live in 
bodies endowed with reason. The results of 
that kind of fishing were empty pews and 
cold hearts, and the conscience-stricken cry 
that went up, " What shall we do to lay 
hold of this great multitude that has sHpped 
from us ? " 

Ten years have passed, and to-day we see 
the churches of every denomination uniting 
in a systematic canvass of the city to get at 



264 A TEN YEARS' WAR 

the facts of the people's Ufe of which they 
had ceased to be a part^ pleading for parks^ 
playgrounds, kindergartens, Hbraries, clubs, 
and better homes. There is a new and 
hearty sound to the word " brother " that is 
full of hope. The cry has been answered. 
The gap in the social body, between rich 
and poor, is no longer widening. We are 
certainly coming closer together. Ten years 
ago, when the King's Daughters lighted a 
Christmas tree in Gotham Court, the children 
ran screaming from Santa Claus as from a 
" bogey man." Last Christmas the boys in 
the Hebrew Institute's schools nearly broke 
the bank laying in supplies to do him honor. 
I do not mean that the Jews are deserting to 
join the Christian church. They are doing 
that which is better, — they are embracing 
its spirit; and they and we are the better 
for it. God knows we waited long enough ; 
and how close we were to each other all the 
while without knowing it! Last Christmas 
a clergyman, who lives out of town and has 
a houseful of children, asked me if I could 
not find for them a poor family in the city 
with children of about the same ages, whom 
they might visit and befriend. He worked 



REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 266 

every day in the office of a foreign mission 
in Fifth Avenue^ and knew little of the life 
that moved about him in the city. I picked 
out a Hungarian widow in an East Side tene- 
ment, whose brave struggle to keep her little 
flock together had enlisted my sympathy 
and strong admiration. She was a cleaner 
in an office building; not until all the ar- 
rangements had been made did it occur to 
me to ask where. Then it turned out that 
she was scrubbing floors in the missionary 
society's house, right at my friend's door. 
They had passed each other every day, each 
in need of the other, and each as far from 
the other as if oceans separated them instead 
of a doorstep four inches wide. 

Looking back over the years that lie be- 
hind with their work, and forward to those 
that are coming, I see only cause for hope. 
As I write these last lines in a far distant 
land, in the city of my birth, the children 
are playing under my window, and calling 
to one another with glad cries in my sweet 
mother tongue, even as we did in the long 
ago. Life and the world are before them, 
bright with the promise of morning. So to 



266 A TEN YEARS* WAR 

me seem the skies at home. Not lightly do 
I say it, for I have known the toil of rough- 
hewing it on the pioneer line that turns 
men's hair gray ; but I have seen also the re- 
ward of the toil. New York is the young- 
est of the world's great cities, barely yet out 
of its knickerbockers. It may be that the 
dawning century will see it as the greatest of 
them all. The task that is set it, the pro- 
blem it has to solve and which it may not 
shirk, is the problem of civilization, of human 
progress, of a people's fitness for self-govern- 
ment that is on trial among us. We shall 
solve it by the world-old formula of human 
sympathy, of humane touch. Somewhere in 
these pages I have told of the woman in 
Chicago who accoimted herself the happiest 
woman alive because she had at last obtained 
a playground for her poor neighbors' chil- 
dren. ^^ I have lived here for years," she said 
to me, ^^ and struggled with principalities and 
powers, and have made up my mind that the 
most and the best I can do is to live right 
here with my people and smile with them, — 
keep smiling ; weep when I must, but smile 
as long as I possibly can." And the tears 
shone in her gentle old eyes as she said it.